MOSCOW, December 29. /TASS/. Russia’s response to the United States’ sanctions against Russian gas pipelines will be well-balanced and adequate, and the construction of the Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline will be completed despite Washington’s sanctions, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak said on Sunday.
"We will take a well-balanced and adequate decision," he said in an interview with the Vesti Nedeli weekly news roundup on the Rossiya-1 television channel when asked about Russia’s possible response to the American sanctions against Nord Stream-2.
"The gas pipeline will be built, despite the sanctions and restrictions. We know how to do that," he stressed.
According to the Russian deputy prime minister, the United States "has different considerations when it comes to others’ energy security." "If it were about its own energy security, I think its decisions would have been quite different," he added.
The US Senate approved the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020, which obliges the administration to target the Russian pipelines Nord Stream 2 and TurkStream with sanctions. On December 11, the House of Representatives voted for it. On December 20, US President Donald Trump signed the bill and it came into force.
Following this bill, Allseas, a Swiss company laying the pipes for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, suspended its work on the project and recalled its ships.
Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said earlier that Nord Stream 2 AG, the project operator, was able to finish the construction of the pipeline without foreign contractors and their pipe-laying vessels. However it would take several months to finish organizational works. According to Novak, the ministry expects Nord Stream-1 to be commissioned by the end of 2020.
Nord Stream-2 is an international project for the construction of a gas pipeline that will run across the bottom of the Baltic Sea from the Russian coast to Germany bypassing transit states, such as Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and other Eastern European and Baltic countries.
The new 1,200 kilometer pipeline, basically following the same route as Nord Stream, will traverse economic zones and territorial water of five countries, namely Russia, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. The pipeline’s capacity will be 55 billion cubic meters of gas a year.