- The Nord Stream gas pipeline restarts with reduced capacity
- Moscow says southern Ukraine is also in focus now
- The US says any annexations will not go unchallenged
- The US estimates 15,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the war so far
July 21 (Reuters) – Russia is resuming gas supplies through a major pipeline to Europe on Thursday, the pipeline’s operator said, amid concerns that Moscow will use its huge energy exports to fend off Western pressure over its invasion of Ukraine.
It could take several hours to resume the reduced capacity Nord Stream 1 pipeline after a 10-day maintenance outage, a spokesman for the operator told Reuters.
The restart of the pipeline came after comments from Russia’s foreign minister showed the Kremlin’s goals had broadened during the five-month war.
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Sergei Lavrov told state news agency RIA Novosti on Wednesday that Russia’s military “tasks” in Ukraine now extend beyond the Eastern Donbas region.
Lavrov also said that Moscow’s goals would expand further if the West continued to supply Kyiv with long-range weapons such as the US-made High Mobility Artillery Missile Systems (HIMARS).
“This means that the geographical tasks will extend even further than the current line,” he said, adding that peace talks do not make sense at the moment. Read more
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov later told RIA that Moscow was not closing the door on talks with Kyiv despite Lavrov’s comments.
Concerns that Russian supplies of gas sent through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline could be cut off by Moscow prompted the European Union to tell member states on Wednesday to cut gas use by 15% by March as an emergency step. Read more
“Russia is blackmailing us. Russia is using energy as a weapon,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said, describing a complete shutdown of Russian gas flows as a “likely scenario” for which “Europe must be prepared.”
A spokesman for Austria’s OMV said Russia’s Gazprom had signaled it would deliver about 50% of contracted gas volumes via Nord Stream on Thursday, levels seen before the shutdown.
Russia, the world’s biggest gas exporter, has rejected Western accusations that it is using its energy supplies as a coercive tool, saying it is a reliable energy supplier.
As for its oil, Russia will not send supplies to the world market if prices are capped below the cost of production, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak was quoted as saying on Wednesday by the Interfax news agency. Read more
FIGHTING TOLL MOUNTS
On the frontline, the Ukrainian military has reported heavy and sometimes fatal Russian shelling amid what it says have been largely unsuccessful attempts by Russian ground forces to advance into the Luhansk and Donetsk regions that make up Donbas.
“There is probably not a single square meter of land in the Luhansk region that has not been affected by Russian artillery,” regional governor Sergei Gaidai said on the Telegram messaging app. “The shelling is very intense. They only stop when the metal “gets tired”.
In the previous 24 hours, Ukrainian forces reported killing more than 100 Russian soldiers in the south and east and destroying 17 vehicles, some of them armored.
The Russian-installed administration in the partially occupied Ukrainian region of Zaporozhye said Ukraine carried out a drone strike on a nuclear power plant there, but the reactor was not damaged. Read more
Multiple explosions were also heard in the Russian-controlled southern region of Kherson overnight and on Thursday, Russian news agency TASS reported.
Reuters could not independently verify the reports.
The Russian invasion killed thousands, displaced millions and collapsed cities, especially in the Russian-speaking regions of eastern and southeastern Ukraine. It has also raised global energy and food prices and increased fears of famine in poorer countries, as Ukraine and Russia are major grain producers.
The United States estimates that Russian losses in Ukraine so far have reached about 15,000 killed and possibly 45,000 wounded, CIA Director William Burns said on Wednesday.
Russia classifies military deaths as a state secret even during peacetime and has not frequently updated its official wartime casualty figures. Read more
THE USA IS OPPOSED TO THE ANNEXATIONS
The United States, which said on Tuesday it was seeing signs that Russia was preparing to formally annex territory it seized in Ukraine, vowed to oppose the annexation.
“We have been clear again that forcible annexation would be a gross violation of the UN Charter and we will not let it go unchallenged. We will not allow him to go unpunished,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said at a regular daily briefing on Wednesday.
Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and supports Russian-speaking separatist entities – the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) – in those provinces, collectively known as Donbas.
Lavrov is the most senior figure to speak openly about Russia’s military goals in territorial terms, nearly five months after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion on February 24, while denying Russia intended to occupy its neighbor.
At the time, Putin said his goal was to demilitarize and “denazify” Ukraine, a statement rejected by Kyiv and the West as a pretext for an imperial-style war of expansion.
Lavrov told RIA Novosti that the geographical realities have changed since Russian and Ukrainian negotiators held peace talks in Turkey in late March that did not lead to any breakthrough.
“Now the geography is different, it’s far from just DPR and LPR, it’s also Kherson and Zaporozhye regions and a number of other territories,” he said, referring to territories far beyond the Donbass that Russian forces have captured in whole or in part.
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Reports from Reuters bureaus; Written by Grant McCool and Lincoln Feist; Editing by Cynthia Osterman, Stephen Coates and Simon Cameron-Moore
Our standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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