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No consensus within NATO on Nord Stream 2 project, says secretary general

Allies have strong opinions, Stoltenberg noted

WARSAW, May 28. /TASS/. There is no consensus within NATO on the Nord Stream 2 project, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said at a press conference with Poland’s President Andrzej Duda in Warsaw, where the spring session of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly is being held.

"When it comes to the Nord Stream, it is well known that there are different views about that among NATO allies, some have expressed very strong views against the Nord Stream project, others have stated that it is a commercial project so they don’t think that politicians should make decisions regarding such a project based on anything else but commercial assessments," he said.

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"NATO is an organization based on consensus and therefore first of all for NATO to make any decisions at all and to express any opinion at all on the Nord Stream will be very difficult because we don’t see any consensus on that issue within the NATO alliance and second, we don’t have tools to do anything with that kind of energy project that is partly for the nations and partly also an issue which I know has been an issue very much discussed within the European Union," Stoltenberg pointed out.

"Allies have strong opinions and I agree that we need to address the question of energy security, I think we can do many things to address energy security, diversification of supplies is a way to address energy security," the NATO secretary general added.

Nord Stream 2 project

The Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline is scheduled to be put into operation in late 2019. Each of the pipeline’s two stretches will have a capacity of 27.5 bln cubic meters. The pipeline, set to run from the Russian coast along the Baltic Sea bed to the German shore, is expected to connect the Russian resource base with European customers. The total project cost of the Nord Stream 2 project is estimated at €9.9 bln.

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