Russia will stop natural gas supplies to Finland, which this week confirmed its candidacy for membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Finnish state-owned energy company Gasum said in a statement that it had been informed by Russia’s Gazprom at 7 a.m. (21 a.m.) this Saturday that supply would be blocked, but assured consumers that it would not be affected.
“We have carefully prepared for this situation and will be able to supply gas to all our customers in the coming months as long as there are no interruptions to the gas transmission grid,” said Gasum CEO Mika Wiljanen. Russia is “sad”.
The Finnish company had already confirmed on May 17 that it would not pay for natural gas sold in rubles by Gazprom, as requested by the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin in retaliation for economic sanctions imposed by the European Union.
“Gasum does not accept Gazprom Export’s request to convert payments into rubles,” the state-owned company said at the time. With this, Finland becomes the third EU country where Moscow has cut gas supplies, joining Bulgaria and Poland.
But the blockade against the Scandinavian nation was announced after Putin applied to join NATO, a Western military alliance accused of viewing Russia as an enemy.
Like Sweden, Finland maintained a historic policy of military neutrality between the West and Moscow, but the two countries abandoned this strategy after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which was not part of the Euro-Atlantic alliance.
The accession process is expected to take less than a year, but Helsinki and Stockholm still face resistance from Turkey in a scenario where they need unanimous approval from member states to join the organisation.
President Putin, on the other hand, did not see the two Scandinavian countries’ entry into NATO as a “threat”, but warned that Moscow’s response would depend on the alliance’s military presence on its territory.
source: Noticias
