MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 01st April, 2021) Russia has never used energy deliveries to Europe as an instrument of pressure and does not plan to, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Wednesday, denying Washington's claims that Moscow used the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline project as a tool for manipulation.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN last week that Washington would put more pressure on companies building Nord Stream 2, running from Russia to Germany, because it allowed Russia to use energy as a "tool of coercion."
"It has been our principled position that we will never use energy resources and our oil and gas routes to Europe [as a tool]," Lavrov told Russia's Channel One.
The diplomat said Russia would never cut energy supplies to "freeze" the Europeans. He pointed at Ukraine, which has cut water supplies to Russia's Crimean Peninsula to its south, while complaining about Nord Stream 2 diverting energy flows away from it.
"We are not the Kiev regime, which has blocked the water canal to Crimea and gave itself a pat on the back ... The West has repeatedly accused us of using energy resources as an instrument of influence but it has kept mum on what Kiev does to the Crimean water supply," Lavrov added.
Gazprom's board of directors chair, Viktor Zubkov, told reporters in Berlin last week that the pipeline was up to 92 percent complete and would be finished this year. It will carry 55 billion cubic meters of gas a year.
