Riga: Not a customer at all: Gazprom announces gas supply freeze for Latvia

The Gazprom group is turning off the faucet in Latvia.

Riga: Not a customer at all: Gazprom announces gas supply freeze for Latvia

The Gazprom group is turning off the faucet in Latvia. The Baltic country announced only the day before that it would purchase Russian gas. But from a different company.

After restrictions and stops on gas deliveries to several EU countries, Russia's largest supplier Gazprom has also stopped supplying Latvia. The neighboring country violated acceptance conditions, the Russian state-owned company said without further explanation. The Latvian utility Latvijas Gaze said the day before that it gets gas from Russia, but not from Gazprom. The name of the provider is a trade secret.

In March, Russia demanded that European Gazprom customers pay their bills in rubles instead of euros or dollars as before. The move is seen as a measure to support Russia's currency following economic sanctions imposed on Russia following its attack on Ukraine. The EU Commission had described a response to the Russian demand as a violation of the sanctions.

Latvijas Gaze, like some other Gazprom customers, has declared that it will continue to pay for Russian gas in euros. Latvia had also announced that it would only purchase gas from Russia until the end of the year. After the start of Moscow's invasion, the flow of gas from Russia to Latvia was interrupted or stopped several times. Deliveries have been increasing since mid-June, according to the capital Riga. Last year, Latvia still bought about 90 percent of its gas from Russia. Latvia's neighbor Lithuania already does without Russian gas.

In connection with the currency dispute, Russia has turned off the gas supply to several countries. Finland, Denmark, Poland, Bulgaria and the Netherlands are no longer supplied. In addition, Gazprom has reduced deliveries to Germany. Gazprom gives technical reasons as justification. The federal government has described this as a pretext for a politically motivated decision.