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| The cessation of pumping occurred at 04:00 Moscow time (01:00 GMT) |
Russia suspends for three days the pumping of gas to Germany by the Nord Stream 1
The Russian gas giant Gazprom suspended this Wednesday and until September 3 the supply of gas to Germany through the Nord Stream pipeline for maintenance work on the only pumping equipment in the operation of the infrastructure.
The cessation of pumping occurred at 04:00 Moscow time (01:00 GMT), according to the real flow data offered on the website of Nord Stream AG, the company that operates the gas pipeline, laid on the bottom of the Baltic Sea. According to Gazprom, "the set of works in accordance with the current technical service contract will be carried out together with specialists from the Siemens company."
The Russian gas company indicated that in correspondence with the manufacturer's technical documentation "every 1,000 hours it is necessary to carry out a technical maintenance of the equipment that includes the review of the chassis to detect cracks, deformations, burn marks."
When the maintenance work is completed, gas pumping will presumably be restored to the level prior to the cessation of operations, of 33 million cubic meters per day.
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War strategy
Russia has been gradually reducing the volume of supplies through the Nord Stream under the guise of technical problems and the need to repair the pipeline's Siemens turbines. On July 27, Gazprom announced the cut in gas pumping to a fifth of the pipeline's capacity, a decision that Berlin says responds to a "war strategy."
This Tuesday, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, indicated that "except for the technical problems caused by the sanctions (on Russia), there is nothing to prevent supplies." He stressed that the sanctions adopted by the United States, Canada, and European countries against Russia "do not allow adequate technical service, repairs or legally formalize the return of the equipment to the place where it is used."
According to Peskov, these obstacles are part of "the irrational actions of Europeans, which are very difficult to understand and impossible to explain, but for which the common citizen has to pay a high price."
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Nord Stream 2
Moscow has repeatedly suggested that the situation could be resolved by putting the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline into operation. This pipeline was never put into operation because Germany froze its certification on February 22, the day after Russia recognized the independence of the self-proclaimed people's republics of Lugansk and Donetsk, and two days before Russia launched its "special military operation" in Ukraine.
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