BELGRADE, September 7. /TASS/. Timely procurements of Russian gas saved Serbia from a catastrophe and power outages, President of Serbia Aleksandar Vucic said on Wednesday at the joint press conference with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

"The fall will be challenging and the winter will be even harder. Many laughed at me when I spoke about that in May - June, and now it can be seen that gas procurements in May and June were the rescue, otherwise we would have an unmitigated disaster. If we did not built the gas pipeline, we would have no gas without the TurkStream or the Balkan Stream, we would have nothing, we would have electricity outages for 8-12 hours, which is not in place now, because a significant portion of our power generating facilities is supplied with gas," Vucic said.

The President of Serbia also said that he had requested President Erdogan to help Serbia with power supplies from Azerbaijan via Turkey amounting to 2 GWh, which is about 10% of country’s needs.

The forthcoming winter in Europe will be a cold one and the next winter will be an Arctic one, Vucic added, commenting on the situation in Europe.