MOSCOW, March 12. /TASS/. The threats of the United States to impose sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline contradict the international law, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Tuesday after talks with Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl.
"Under the international law, this absolutely contradicts all the premises, all norms. It’s not for nothing that our American and some other Western colleagues no longer use this phrase "international law." They urge everyone to follow the so called "rules based order", the minister said.
"If we follow the international law, then there must be an elementary competition of economic proposals. This also meets the WTO rules," he added.
"We must fairly compete. Because we see gross violations of all ethical and legal norms, when the United States demands from any country not to buy raw materials and energy resources from Russia, but to buy them from the United States, not to buy products from Russia as part of military-technical cooperation, and to buy more expensive products from the United States," Lavrov said.
"Unfair competition in sports has already become a talk of the town," he added.
Lavrov noted that Washington’s manner "to dictate everything to everyone means no good."
"We have already warned our American colleagues that, maybe in a very short historical period - a year or two or three years - they will get some kind of profit, but in a strategic, long-term view, they undermine confidence in the very international system that is based on the dollar. That means no good for them in the end," the top diplomat stressed.
Nord Stream 2
The Nord Stream 2 pipeline is expected to come into service at the end of 2019. The pipeline is set to run from the Russian coast along the Baltic Sea bed to the German shore.
The United States strongly opposes the new gas pipeline from Russia to Europe. Washington has repeatedly threatened to impose sanctions on the project, including its European participants. The Russian authorities view it as an attempt to increase the supply of American liquefied natural gas (LNG) to the EU, which is significantly more expensive than the Russian pipeline.
According to the report on the state of EU-Russia political relations approved on Tuesday, the European Parliament considers necessary to curtail the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project,
"Russia and the EU will remain key economic partners in the foreseeable future, but Nord Stream 2 reinforces EU dependency on Russian gas supplies, threatens the EU internal market and is not in line with EU energy policy, and therefore needs to be stopped," the report says.