KIEV, December 7. /TASS/. Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk has addressed the European Union (EU) with a request to block the Nord Stream 2 project, he said at a joint briefing with the EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini in Brussels on Monday.
"We’re addressing our European partners so that the Nord Stream 2 project passed the toughest inspection, and we think that the project should be blocked as it does not meet the interests of either the EU or Ukraine," he said.
"It (the project) leaves Ukraine, Poland and Slovakia without billions of dollars of revenues as well as leaves the EU without competition on the gas market, making it conditional on Gazprom," Yatsenyuk said.
As was reported earlier in end-November nine countries of central and eastern Europe, led by Poland and Slovakia, sent a letter to the European Council president Donald Tusk demanding that the construction of the pipeline should be put on the agenda of the EU leaders’ summit in December while implementation of the project should be blocked. They said that the new pipeline, which will be the second to connect Russia and Germany under the Baltic Sea, will increase Europe’s dependence on Russia’s Gazprom, and that the project contradicts the EU’s own energy diversification and security policies.
On September 4, 2015 Gazprom signed a shareholder agreement on the Nord Stream expansion with Basf, E.ON, Engie, OMV and Shell. The pipeline with capacity of 55 bln cubic meters of gas will deliver fuel via the Baltic Sea directly to Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, France, Denmark and other countries bypassing Ukraine. Thus, strategic energy flows will bypass Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Ukraine.