If Russia invades Ukraine, there will be no Nord Stream 2: Biden

Bloomberg

US President Joe Biden said the controversial Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline between Russia and Germany would be stopped if President Vladimir Putin orders an invasion of Ukraine.
“We will bring an end to it,” Biden said at a joint news conference at the White House with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in a short answer to a question about whether he had received assurances from Scholz. “The notion that Nord Stream 2 is going to go forward with an invasion by the Russians — that’s not going to happen.”
Moscow has repeatedly denied that it plans to attack Ukraine, while the UK and US say Russia has massed almost 130,000 troops close to the border.
Scholz, who has tended to play up the urgency for diplomacy with Russia, warned about the potential price to the Kremlin, but stopped short of specifically mentioning the pipeline, which bypasses Ukraine and has been a point of contention within his coalition.
He was pressed on whether he would commit to sanctioning Nord Stream 2. The new German leader switched to English to make plain that there was no daylight between Germany and its allies. He made no effort to dispel Biden’s pledge that the pipeline would be stopped.
“We are acting together, we are absolutely united – and we will not take different steps,” Scholz said. “We will do the same steps, and they will be very, very hard to Russia, and they should understand.”
Earlier, his top diplomat said that Europe’s largest economy was willing to “pay a high economic price” that would come with supply cutoffs. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock is a member of the Greens and has been more explicit than Scholz in pledging to target Nord Stream 2.
The chancellor later underscored those comments, saying Germany is “ready to take steps that will have costs for us,” Scholz said in an interview with CNN.
European natural gas rose on Tuesday after Biden’s warning and as Russian flows through a key route declined. Dutch front-month gas futures rose as much as 4.3% to 83 euros a megawatt-hour and traded 1.4% higher by 8:55 a.m. in Amsterdam.
Nord Stream 2, a twin gas link across the Baltic Sea, is set to carry as much as 55 billion cubic meters per year from Russia to Germany. The project was initially expected to start operations by the end of 2019, but it has faced multiple regulatory hurdles.
A main concern for Europe, which depends on Russia for gas, is trying to secure supplies in a scenario where it could get cut off. Biden sought to address this worry and said the U.S. had been looking for alternative sources: “We think we could make up a significant portion of it that would be lost.”
The comments from Biden represent the largest-yet commitment by the U.S. to ensure European allies have sufficient supplies of natural gas amid potential conflict with Russia, which provides about 40% of the bloc’s needs today.

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Meanwhile in Moscow, French President Emmanuel Macron held almost six hours of talks with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin and a long six-course dinner that dragged late into the night but yielded no breakthrough of any kind, more a reiteration of positions and some conciliatory language.