A new gas transit deal between Russia and Ukraine should assuage fears over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, European Commission Vice President Maroš Šefčovič said.
Ukrainian and Russian officials reached a last-minute agreement on gas supply late on Friday following Thursday’s nine-hour round of talks brokered by the Commission. The two countries’ current contract was due to expire at the end of December.
“It’s a very firm deal,” Šefčovič told POLITICO in an interview on Saturday. “This is a deal that’s good for Europe, Ukraine and Russia.”
The agreement lays out plans for Russia to send a minimum of 65 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas through Ukraine’s transit system in 2020, with an additional 40 bcm each year by 2025, Šefčovič said. The agreement runs until 2034, but the later volumes have yet to be decided on.
Šefčovič said that the gas supply volumes agreed for 2020-2024 under the new transit deal ought to put criticism of the Nord Stream 2 project — an expansion to the undersea pipeline system between Germany and Russia — into a new “political and commercialized perspective in Europe and the United States.”
The United States in particular have raised concerns that Nord Stream 2 could turn into a security risk for Europe, increasing the Continent’s energy dependence on Russia and giving Moscow the option to bypass Ukraine, costing the Ukrainian economy billions in transit fees. On Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump signed off on sanctions targeting companies involved in the project.
But Šefčovič said the agreement should allay fears that the pipeline could cut Ukraine off from Russian gas. “Ukrainian transit is of strategic importance for the EU and is the key requirement of European energy security,” he said.
The existing Nord Stream pipeline, which circumnavigates Ukraine and runs undersea from Russia to the German coast, has a capacity of 55 bcm each year. The Nord Stream 2 project would double the system’s capacity to 110 bcm a year.
Germany imports around 100 bcm of gas each year and would be the major beneficiary of the expansion project. But Chancellor Angela Merkel has made continued transit of gas through Ukraine a condition for her support for the pipeline, raising the transit issue during recent talks with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
CORRECTION: This story was corrected to reflect that Russia has agreed to send 40 bcm of gas per year through Ukraine until the end of 2024.