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Nord Stream 2 works in German zone to be over on September 12 — agency

By now, the pipeline is 99% ready

© Axel Schmidt/Nord Stream 2

MOSCOW, August 22. /TASS/. The Fortuna ship is expected to finish pipelaying works under the Nord Stream 2 project in the German zone on September 12, 2021, Bloomberg said on Sunday, citing Germany’s maritime authorities.

According to Maine Traffic, the Fortuna pipelaying ship is now working in Germany’s territorial waters.

By now, the pipeline is 99% ready. In was reported in late July that the Fortuna was working on the final section of the pipeline.

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 1,230-kilometer pipeline, basically following the same route as Nord Stream, traverses the economic zones and territorial water of five countries, namely Russia, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany.

Works under the project were suspended in December 2019 after Allseas, a Swiss company laying the pipes for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, suspended pipe-laying works over possible US sanctions and recalled its ships. Works were resumed in December 2020.

On July 21, 2021, the United States and Germany published an agreement on the Nord Stream 2 project, where Washington recognized that sanctions would not stop the project implementation and Berlin undertook to take effort to ensure the extension of Russian gas via Ukraine. The United States however reserved the right to take measures in case Russia, as it put it, uses energy as a geopolitical weapon in Europe and in case of its aggression against Ukraine.

The Russian side has repeatedly stressed that Nord Stream 2 is not a commercial project and is being implemented jointly with European partners. Russian president's press secretary Dmitry Peskov expressed resentment over attempts of a number of countries to link the future of the project to politically-motivated circumstances. Moscow has also repeatedly stressed that it has never used energy resources as an instrument of pressure.

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