Twelve European Union countries have been affected by cuts to the gas supply from Russia, the EU climate policy chief Frans Timmermans said on Thursday.
“Russia has weaponized energy, and we have seen further gas disruptions announced in recent days. All this is part of Russia’s strategy to undermine our unity,” Timmermans said in the European Parliament.
“In total twelve Member States are now affected by Russian unilateral supply cuts. Ten Member States have issued an early warning under the gas security of supply regulation,” he said.
“The risk of full gas disruption is now more real than ever before,” he stressed, adding this is why it is important to adopt gas storage regulation alongside other measures of preparedness.
The twelve EU countries that are partially or totally affected by Russian gas disruptions are: Lithuania, Bulgaria, Poland, Germany, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy, France, Austria, Czech Republic and Slovakia.
The EU countries that have issued early warning declarations as a precautionary move are: Italy (26/02), Latvia (09/03), Croatia (25/04), Germany (30/03), Austria (30/03), Finland (06/05), Estonia (18/05), Denmark (20/06), the Netherlands (20/06) and Sweden (21/06).
Germany has just announced, and informed the EU Commission, that it is moving to step 2 of the EU SoS regulation, the “alert” level, a EU Commission spokesperson told CNN via email.
The “early warning” is the lowest level of crisis notification under the bloc’s Gas Security of Supply Regulation, accelerating the monitoring and information exchange requirements in the Member State concerned. According to this regulation, the natural gas undertakings concerned shall make technical information available, on a daily basis, to the competent authority of the Member State.
