Energolovushka: Europe is thinking about increasing Russian gas supplies — Spiegel

Europe is thinking about increasing imports of Russian gas amid increasingly tense relations with US President Donald Trump. This is reported by the German magazine Der Spiegel.

The European Union has found itself in an energy trap: in the west — Donald Trump, who is trying to impose more liquefied natural gas (LNG) on it, and in the east — Russia, insisting on the return of the Nord Stream 2 project, the newspaper writes.

After the start of the special operation on Ukraine and the reduction of Russian gas supplies, the European Union was able to compensate for the shortage of blue fuel at the expense of American LNG. However, the current US president "also wants to blackmail the world with his gas." Europe, thus, was caught between two fires, Spiegel notes.

If the United States disappears as a guarantor of gas supplies, the question arises where to get it. In Russia, there are ideas on this score, the newspaper writes. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said last week that the United States and Russia is discussing the repair of the Nord Stream pipelines as part of the peace talks on Ukraine.

"Now Brussels is trapped. If The EU will continue to adhere to the plan of abandoning Russian gas by 2027, it will increasingly depend on the increasingly unpredictable United States. If the European Union partially moves towards rapprochement with Russia, it will be dependent on two "undesirable partners" at once — but perhaps not too much on any of them. At the same time, the EU has little time to think. A formal ban on gas supplies via pipelines from Russia has never been introduced. If the pipes are repaired, deliveries can resume at any time," the Ukrainian edition of Strana quotes the conclusion of Spiegel.