Russia announced that it paralyzed gas supply to Latvia

Amid its sanctions dispute with Europe over the invasion of Ukraine, Russia suspended the shipment of gas to Latvia.Russian state giant Gazprom announced that it paralyzed supply to Latvia “for the violation of gas dispatch conditions,” according to a message from the company quoted by the Sputnik news agency. the Latvian firm Latvijas Gaze, one of the largest distributors of natural gas in the Baltic, reported that it had resumed purchases of that hydrocarbon in Russia, but from a different supplier and with payments made in euros and not in rubles. For his part, Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded in late March that “hostile countries” pay for gas in rubles, under the pretext that Western sanctions froze Russian assets in foreign currencies, in a decision that the European Union (EU) denounced as “blackmail”. In this way, Gazprom this week moderated its gas supply to Europe through the Nord Stream pipeline, alleging maintenance work on a turbine. Following this line, Western countries accused Russia of using the gas cuts in retaliation for the sanctions adopted against it. But the Kremlin said that the sanctions are what caused the technical problems of the gas infrastructure and that the Europeans are suffering the consequences of the measures they imposed on Moscow.

Original source in Spanish