Polish PM hopes Nord Stream never becomes operational again
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Poland's premier underlines that he hopes Russia's natural gas pipelines never become operational again after his country's former foreign minister mocked the incident.
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Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Marowiecki voiced on Tuesday his aspirations that Nord Stream 2 is never rendered operational, criticizing Germany over its dependence on Russian gas and calling it a "huge mistake".
"There was this huge, huge mistake made by the Germans in their policy of dependency on Russian gas," Morawiecki said during an interview with The Washington Post.
"They have built Nord Stream 1, and then Nord Stream 2, which was about to be operational, and the war broke out… I hope it is never going to be operational in the future," the Polish premier added.
According to Morawiecki, Poland has been independent of Russian gas, recently - and suspiciously - having finished building a new pipeline linking it with Norway and Denmark, dubbed as the Baltic Pipe.
The Baltic Pipe gas pipeline has started pumping oil gas from the Norwegian shelf into Poland via Denmark, Polish gas pipeline operator GAZ-System said earlier in the month, just a few days after the incidents that disabled Russia's Nord Stream pipeline into Europe.
Poland had Russian energy cut off from it after Warsaw refused to comply with Moscow's demand to have its energy supplies paid for in Russian rubles. Poland was receiving around 10 billion cubic meters of Russian gas per year through the Yamal-Europe pipeline.
As for other fossil fuels, Morawiecki said, Poland was able to quickly replace Russian imports, which he called a "rare situation" in Europe.
Before the Ukraine war broke out, the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which was a joint Russian-German venture that connected both countries, made Germany Europe's gas hub and supplied EU countries with some 35% of the gas they imported from Russia.
The pipeline is owned and operated by Nord Stream, a corporation majority owned by Russia's state-owned Gazprom.
Nord Stream 1 has not been operational since August after Russian shut it down due to maintenance issues. Nord Stream 2, on the other hand, is yet to spring into action after Germany halted the certification process last year.
In light of the explosions that targeted Russia's pipeline in the Baltic Sea, European Parliament member and former Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski tweeted "Thank you, USA," along with a picture of the massive gas spill in the Baltic Sea. Off the shore of the Danish island of Bornholm, both pipelines sustained significant damage in what is now largely seen as a premeditated attack.
He later deleted the tweet posted in the aftermath of the explosions that affected Russia's Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines earlier in the week.
He had no reservations about who could have been responsible for Monday's Nord Stream pipeline explosion that shut off Germany from Russian gas.
However, Sikorski did not delete another tweet that read "As we say in Polish, a small thing, but so much joy" with the same picture of the bubbling water attached.
