Energy crisis: Why has Russia cut off gas supplies to Europe?

Europe has been thrown into its biggest energy crisis in decades with natural gas supplies from Russia becoming volatile and unpredictable even before the invasion of Ukraine began. Now, those supplies have come to a complete halt.

Russia claims punitive economic sanctions imposed on it by the West are responsible for the indefinite halt to gas supplies via Europe’s main pipeline.
“Problems in pumping arose because of the sanctions imposed against our country and against a number of companies by Western states, including Germany and the U.K.,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday, according to Russian state news agency Interfax.

Asked whether pumping gas via Nord Stream 1 was completely dependent on the sanctions and that supplies would resume if these were lifted or relaxed, Peskov replied, “Of course. The very sanctions that prevent the maintenance of units, which prevent them from moving without appropriate legal guarantees, which prevent these legal guarantees from being given, and so on.”

“It is precisely these sanctions that the Western states have introduced that have brought the situation to what we see now,” Peskov added.