European gas firms seek ways to pay after Putin’s roubles demand

theguardian.com:

Energy companies in Europe are considering opening Russian accounts to pay for gas from Gazprom after Vladimir Putin’s regime cut off supplies to Poland and Bulgaria and insisted other countries must pay in roubles.

Big gas distributors in Germany and Austria confirmed they were seeking ways to continue to make payments after Putin signed a decree at the end of March calling for a “special procedure for foreign buyers’ fulfilment of obligations to Russian suppliers of natural gas”.

The decree stipulates that non-Russian buyers of gas must open special “K” type rouble and foreign currency accounts at Gazprombank, the third-largest bank in Russia. Gazprombank was set up to be a service provider to Gazprom, the state-owned gas producer that has a monopoly on exports via gas pipelines to Europe.

The German distributor Uniper and Austria’s OMV confirmed they were considering how to comply with the decree. The Financial Times reported that companies in Hungary and Slovakia, as well as Italy’s Eni, were also considering signing up for the accounts in the hope of securing continued supplies, despite the European Commission saying that doing so could breach sanctions.

Poland and Bulgaria have taken a defiant position, refusing to sign up to Putin’s preferred arrangement. Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, described Russia’s retaliatory suspension of gas supplies as a “direct attack”.

However, Germany, Europe’s largest economy and largest Russian gas user, has adopted a more emollient tone amid fears – disputed by some analysts – that an embargo would be impossible without crashing its economy.

A spokesperson for Uniper, one of Germany’s main buyers of gas from Russia, on Thursday confirmed it was in talks with Gazprom “in