“Is the so-called European hub on the Turkey-Greece border possible? This does not depend on us. It depends mostly on our European partners. Whether they want stable, secure and absolutely clear deliveries of energy resources that they need so badly from Russia, without transit risks. If yes, then we will work in this direction,” the Russian president said during a press conference.
On December 1, during his visit to Turkey Putin said that Russia would abandon the South Stream pipeline project, designed to bring Russian natural gas to a number of EU countries via a new route under the Black Sea bypassing Ukraine, in light of the European Commission's "non-constructive" stance on the matter.
The European Commission had long claimed that the pipeline was in breach of the European Union's Third Energy Package, which states that owning a pipeline and producing the gas that flows through it is an illegal conflict of interest.
The same day, the CEO of Russia’s energy giant Gazprom Alexei Miller announced that an alternative pipeline going through Turkey with an annual capacity of 63 billion cubic meters will be constructed. Some 14 billion cubic meters of gas will be supplied to Turkey, while the rest is to be pumped to a hub on the Turkish-Greece border for customers in southern Europe.
