Mysterious games with short supply of gas to the EU

Last week, a number of EU countries accused Gazprom of a reduction in their gas supplies. Such claims came from Poland, Austria, Germany and Slovakia. The European mass media began to talk about start of “gas war”.

At the same time, Gazprom explained the events with the need to fill in the Russian underground storages and hastened to reassure its customers that they would have their gas in the contracted volumes. And then another version occurred - thus the Russian gas concern struggles with reverse gas supplies from the EU to the Ukraine.

Let’s recall that Poland was the first to sound the alarm. The Polish company PGNiG reported about the decrease in the supply of gas from Russia on Wednesday, September 10th. It reported about the reduction of the gas supplies from Russia, it stopped the reverse gas supplies to the Ukraine for two days. However, on September 12th, the reverse gas supplies was resumed in full.

Following Poland, Austria and Slovakia reported about the shortfall in the supplies of Russian gas to. According to the Austrian company E-Control, on Thursday, September 11th, the volume of the supplied gas was by 15% less than the contract one. However, Austria didn’t sound the alarm.

"Such fluctuations in the supply of gas are not uncommon. Russia usually quickly explains the reason,"- head of E-Control Walter Boltz reported in an interview with Die Presse.

And at the end of the week, the German energy group E.ON reported that it was getting smaller volumes of gas from Russia, but didn’t say, however, how by much they are smaller.

"The current small restrictions in the supplies of Russian gas have no effect on the situation of energy supply," - a representative of the German company stated.