Ukraine’s Prime Minister has urged the European Union to block the Nord Stream II gas pipeline project.
“We believe that this project has to be stopped, banned because we do not think it is in the interest of Ukraine and [the] European union,” Arseniy Yatsenyuk said after meeting with two senior EU officials yesterday.
The pipeline, Yatsenyuk said, will give “more of a monopoly to Russian gas.”
In June, Royal Dutch Shell plc, E.ON AG and OMV AG announced that they would permit Gazprom to ship an extra 55 billion m3/yr of gas to Europe through the Nord Stream pipeline via the Baltic Sea.
Yatsenyuk said: "We’re addressing our European partners so that the Nord Stream II project passed the toughest inspection, and we think that the project should be blocked as it does not meet the interests of either the EU or Ukraine," he said.
"It (the project) leaves Ukraine, Poland and Slovakia without billions of dollars of revenues as well as leaves the EU without competition on the gas market, making it conditional on Gazprom," Yatsenyuk said.
Edited from various sources by Elizabeth Corner
Sources: Wall Street Journal, Tass