MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 06th June, 2020) The United States is conducting "economic warfare" against Europe and Russia by tightening sanctions to block the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline's completion, Steffen Kotre, the spokesman of the Alternative for Germany party in the Bundestag's committee on economic affairs and energy, told Sputnik on Friday.
On Thursday, US senators introduced a bipartisan bill that would expand sanctions on Nord Stream 2 to include all companies that provide certification, insurance and port facilities for the project. The bill comes as Russia seeks to finish the twin pipeline on its own after the previous US sanctions, included in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, forced Swiss pipelaying company Allseas to quit the project in December with just 100 miles of the pipeline left to lay.
"It is an act of economic warfare against Europe and Russia. The battlefield is the energy sector. The USA wants to sell their vastly overpriced fracking oil to Europe," Kotre said.
The US behavior, the lawmaker added, is running counter to all principles of fair trade.
"I expect the German government to act vigorously and introduce countermeasures," the politician said.
The US has been actively seeking to disrupt the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which will carry up to 1.942 trillion cubic feet of gas per year to Germany via the Baltic Sea, under the pretext of protecting Europe's energy security.
Moscow has consistently said that the pipeline, which is a joint venture of Gazprom and five European companies, is a mutually beneficial and purely commercial project with competitive prices and not means of political influence on Europe. Russia believes that the US is seeking to force it out of the European energy market to sell more liquefied natural gas to the continent.
Berlin also condemns US extraterritorial sanctions. Earlier on Friday, the head of the German parliamentary committee on economic affairs and energy, Klaus Ernst, told Sputnik that the country may impose additional duties on gas imports from the US if the pressure on Nord Stream 2 continues.
