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Putin has no doubt Russia will be able to finish Nord Stream 2 construction on its own

The Russian president admitted that they would have to extend the deadline for the construction for several months

© Mikhail Metzel/TASS

MOSCOW, January 11. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin has no doubt that Russian will be capable of finishing the construction of Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline on its own and the pipeline will be put into operation, the Russian leader said after his talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Moscow on Saturday.

"Yes, we will definitely be able to finish the construction [of the pipeline] by ourselves," Putin assured. "The question is about the timeframe. It is the only question raised in this context."

The Russian president admitted that they would have to extend the deadline for the construction for several months.

"I hope that by the end of the current year or in the first quarter of next year, the work will be over and the gas pipeline will be put into operation," Putin concluded.

US President Donald Trump on December 20, 2019 signed the US defense budget envisaging sanctions against companies that participate in the Nord Stream 2 and Turkish Stream projects. A day later, in the face of the sanctions the Swiss company Allseas, which lies the Nord Stream 2 pipe, suspended construction work and revoked ships involved in the project.

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.

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