In Brussels, in the middle of summer, Pascal De Buck, the boss of Fluxys, the Belgian gas transport and storage company, acknowledged, without much enthusiasm, the new package of sanctions decided in June by the European Union against Russia. “We will obviously implement them, but it is not as simple as it seems”he confided to the Belgian newspaper on Saturday August 10 The Echo.
Because, for the first time since Moscow launched the war against Ukraine in February 2022, the European Union (EU) has decided to partially tackle the Russian gas trade, through sanctions. Indeed, from March 2025, it will be forbidden to “tranship” Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) onto ships docked in European ports.
The ban will therefore focus only on the re-export of gas and will spare imports of Russian LNG intended for the European market. “The decision to sanction the transshipment of Russian gas is a positive signal, even if the implementation period is long and it will indirectly contribute to financing the Russian war effort for another six months.”, comments Nadia Cornejo, spokesperson for Greenpeace Belgium.
Since 2022, the environmental protection NGO has continued to denounce the role of Fluxys as “war sponsor”citing its storage and transshipment infrastructure that facilitates the enrichment of Vladimir Putin's regime through the gas trade.
“War Sponsor”: The term is also the one used by the Ukrainian government, which, as early as 2023, put Fluxys on its “black list”. Faced with these accusations, the company then considered itself to be tied hand and foot by a long-term contract worth 1 billion euros, signed for twenty years with the company Yamal LNG, 50.1% owned by the Russian energy company Novatek and 20% by the French company TotalEnergies.
“Political compromises”
In the Belgian port of Zeebrugge, located on the North Sea, Fluxys not only offers its ship-to-ship transhipment infrastructure, such as the Montoir-de-Bretagne terminal (Loire-Atlantique), but has also provided Yamal LNG with Europe's only LNG storage warehouse since 2019. The Zeebrugge infrastructure also allows the regasification of gas before injection into the Belgian and European networks.
The port thus rose to the rank of the largest importer of Russian gas, ahead of Montoir, and has continued to increase its imports as the war raged. From 2020 to 2023, the flow of Russian LNG to Zeebrugge increased by around 19%. Of the total volume of Russian gas arriving there in the first half of 2024, just over half was injected into the European network, often to Germany. The rest was therefore “transshipped” onto other ships – most of them to distant destinations – including around 12% to European ports.
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Source: Lemonde
