Russia stops gas supplies to Austria

Gazprom halts gas to Austria's OMV amid transit disputes as Ukraine pipeline deal nears year-end shutdown.

MOSCOW:

Russian gas giant Gazprom continued to pump steady volumes of gas to Europe via Ukraine on Saturday, but supplies to Austrian energy company OMV were halted hours after Vienna said Russia had given notice it would cut off flows.

Russia, which before the Ukraine war was the biggest supplier of natural gas to Europe, has lost almost all of its European customers.

Now, one of the last main Russian gas routes to Europe, the Soviet-era Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgorod pipeline via Ukraine, is due to shut down at the end of this year as Kyiv does not want to extend a five-year transit agreement, which brings northern Siberian gas to Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Austria. Austria said on Friday that Moscow had informed it that gas would be shut off from Saturday following an arbitration award to OMV, Austria's biggest energy supplier, over unfulfilled Gazprom supplies to its German unit.