Mike Pompeo hasn’t missed a day in his final weeks in office to lay waste to something, somewhere. Today it was yet more sanctions on Nord Stream 2, the 95%- completed second underwater pipeline from Russia to Germany. It adds two pipe-laying vessels and companies involved in the multinational project to the sanction list, and any companies which do business with them. The pipe-laying vessels Fortuna and Maksim Gorky, as well as two Russian firms, KVT-Rus and Rustanker, were blacklisted on Tuesday under CAATSA (Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act).
As a result of this and other illegal and insane sanctions against it, Russia’s Gazprom has warned that Nord Stream 2 could be suspended or even canceled. Despite the fact that both Russia and Germany, and other European nations, are fully committed to the project, and deeply involved financially, the company fears the project could be destroyed. As a partially public company, it is required to let its investors know about future risks.
The US sanctions also drove major insurance companies to lift their insurance on the project, afraid that their US operations will be destroyed. On Sunday, the Zurich Insurance Group severed its ties, for fear of sanctions, as the Norwegian company Det Norske Veritas-Germanischer Lloyd had last November.
The anger in Germany is mounting. Klaus Ernst, the chairman of the German parliament’s Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy, called for a tariff to be placed on all imports of US LNG. Calling the US sanctions unacceptable, adding, according to RT, that the US had no right to just promote the economic interests of the American gas sector, and at the same time to degrade their so-called allies, turning them into subordinates. He also urged the federal government to summon the acting US ambassador and clearly explain the US position. He added that incoming President Joe Biden wouldn’t change the US’s “aggressive economic policy.”
