Russia was accused of seeking to blackmail Europe as the energy supplier Gazprom confirmed it had halted gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria, prompting crisis talks in capitals across Europe.
In a statement, Gazprom said it had acted in response to the failure by the two EU countries to make their payments in roubles. “Gazprom has completely suspended gas supplies to Bulgargaz and PGNiG due to absence of payments in roubles.”
The Bulgarian Prime Minister, Kiril Petkov, has said demands to change the payment scheme were a grave breach of a contract and amounted to blackmail. Both Bulgaria and Poland say they have sufficient stored energy for the foreseeable future.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, condemned the move, saying that fellow EU countries would come to Poland and Bulgaria’s aid. She said: “The announcement by Gazprom that it is unilaterally stopping delivery of gas to customers in Europe is yet another attempt by Russia to use gas as an instrument of blackmail. This is unjustified and unacceptable.”
The speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament, the Duma, has said Gazprom made the right decision in fully suspending gas supplies to Bulgaria and Poland and said Moscow should do the same with other “unfriendly” countries.
In the UK, the deputy prime minister, Dominic Raab, said the UK would stand “shoulder to shoulder” with Poland over energy blackmail. He said: “We cannot allow Vladimir Putin’s bullying behaviour, whether it is economic warfare, or it is military warfare, to succeed.”
Russia’s defence ministry said its Kalibr missiles had struck an arms depot in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region housing weapons from the US and European countries.
Russian forces have established control over the town of Zarichne after storming the settlement of Yampil, the Ukrainian military has said in its latest operational report as of 6am today.
Russian forces were again attacking the huge Azovstal steel plant where fighters and some civilians are holed up in the southern city of Mariupol, an aide to the city’s mayor said.
A series of blasts sounded across the Russian city of Belgorod near the Ukrainian border early on Wednesday morning as authorities extinguished a fire at an ammunition depot. Regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said he woke “to a loud sound like an explosion” at about 3.35am in an update posted to Telegram.
Ukrainian presidential aide Mykhailo Podolyak described explosions heard in three Russian provinces bordering Ukraine as “karma” and payback for the war in Ukraine. He did not acknowledge Ukraine was responsible for the incidents.
The interior ministry of Moldova’s breakaway region of Transnistria has issued a statement this morning claiming it came under attack from Ukraine. It said drones were spotted and shots were fired near Kolbasna, which it claims contains one of the largest ammunition dumps in Europe.
In Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s latest national address, the Ukrainian president said he believed Russia was trying to destabilise the situation in the Transnistrian region, while Ukrainian armed forces were ready for a possible escalation by Russian troops in the breakaway territory of Moldova.
Poland’s government has issued a statement to say that it had arrested “a citizen of the Russian Federation and a citizen of Belarus who were engaged in espionage activities in Poland” and that a court had “ordered their detention on remand for three months”.
