Russia's Foreign Ministry hit back at the State Department on Thursday after a U.S. official warned Germany against tying itself too closely to Russian gas pipelines.

"We will not talk about how correct it is for a representative of the USA to take it upon himself to give Germany instructions on how to manage its partnership with Russia in an area as important as gas," Russia's Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

In an interview published in the Financial Times Deutschland on Monday, Matthew Bryza, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for the Caucasus and southern Europe, said Germany could be making a mistake by relying too much on Russia for its gas.

Germany's BASF and E.ON are minority shareholders in the new Nord Stream pipeline that will run from gas fields in Russia, under the Baltic Sea, to Germany's north.

"That project simply raises the question what diversification means when it comes to gas supply," Bryza said.

Germany is already the top European customer of Russian gas monopoly Gazprom. It supplies a quarter of Europe's gas and its share of the market is expected to rise in coming decades as North Sea supplies begin to peter out.

But the huge firm, the world's largest gas company, tarnished its reputation at the start of this year by cutting gas supplies to Ukraine, the key transit route to Europe, because of a price dispute.

"If you live in Germany you do not want to go through what happened last winter with Ukraine," Bryza said in the interview. "I wonder as a U.S. official how much diversification anybody can develop by having more pipelines into the same supplier."

President Vladimir Putin has said Germany could become a gas distribution hub for Europe, a vision that worries some of the European Union's newest members, who rely on the bloc's collective bargaining power to get a fair deal from Gazprom.

The Russian Foreign Ministry statement said U.S. officials had previously criticized the Blue Stream pipeline supplying Russian gas to Europe via Turkey, as if the link meant Turkey and Europe were falling into dependence on Russia.

It said reality had been quite different, and the success of the pipeline meant there were now discussions about expanding it.

"Unfortunately, the impression is being created that U.S. opposition first to Blue Stream and now to the Nord Stream is not based on worries about Europe's energy security, but on the principle professed by some American officials -- that a good gas pipeline is one that skirts around Russia."

  Add comment

Name:
E-Mail:
Comment:
Enter code: