China Daily Global Edition (USA)
EU gets taste of gas reprisals as standoff deepens
POKROVSK, Ukraine — Russia has cut off gas supplies to two European Union nations that staunchly back Ukraine, in a development that comes hot on the heels of a visit to Moscow by the United Nations chief.
A day after the United States and other Western allies vowed to speed up the flow of weapons to Ukraine, the Kremlin on Wednesday upped the ante when it used its all-important gas exports as leverage in a standoff with the West.
European gas prices shot up on the news, with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen denouncing the move as an attempt at blackmail.
The spike in European gas prices reached as high as 24 percent after the decision.
The escalation came in a memo from state-controlled Russian giant Gazprom, which said it had cut natural gas deliveries to Poland and
Bulgaria because they refused to pay in Russian roubles, as President Vladimir Putin had demanded. The company said it had not received any payments since the beginning of the month.
Poland’s President Andrzej Duda said on Wednesday he was sure legal action would be taken against the decision. Bulgaria gets over 90 percent of its gas from Russia, and officials said they were working to find other sources.
On Tuesday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Putin met for the first time since the conflict began on Feb 24, and the United Nations said they had agreed on arranging evacuations from a besieged steel plant in the battered Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the Russian leader and the UN chief discussed “proposals for humanitarian assistance and evacuation of civilians from conflict zones, namely in relation to the situation in Mariupol”.
They also agreed in principle, he said, that the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross should be involved in the evacuation of civilians from the Azovstal steel complex.
During the meeting, which the UN said lasted nearly two hours, Putin and Guterres sat at opposite ends of a long white table in a room with gold curtains bordered in red. No one else was at the table.
Proxy war
In other developments on the diplomatic front, Russia has claimed Western nations’ support of Ukraine in the conflict amounts to NATO fighting a proxy war against it.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Russian state media that the West’s provision of military equipment to Ukraine as part of that support is something that carries “considerable” risk.
As Russia’s special military operation entered into its third month, an ammunition dump caught fire in a Russian region bordering Ukraine and two other nearby regions reported explosions early on Wednesday, authorities in the Belgorod region said.
The Kursk region north of Belgorod also reported explosions in the administrative center of Kursk.
In the Voronezh region east of Kursk and Belgorod, two explosions were heard 300 kilometers from the Ukrainian border near a Russian military airfield, according to the state-owned newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta.