Germany’s decision on Nord Stream 2 will irrevocably affect relations with Russia — MFA
On February 22, the German chancellor announced that the German government was suspending the certification of the Nord Stream 2 project after Russia recognized the sovereignty of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics
Berlin's decision to stop certification of the Nord Stream 2 project will cause irreversible damage to Russian-German relations, Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a comment.
"We would like to declare that Berlin’s decision to stop the project will result in irreversible damage to Russian-German relations, which have been far from cloudless in recent years through no fault of ours. Responsibility for the consequences of these illegitimate actions, which call into question the reputation of Germany as a reliable foreign economic partner, rests entirely on the German side," the document says.
"We believe the decision of German authorities to terminate the process of Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline certification is unacceptable and mischievous from the standpoint of norms of international commercial law," Zakharova said.
"We believe this is a classic precedent of using the commercial project as the political weapon against us, which the collective West at large and official Berlin, in particular, are so fond of blaming Moscow for," she added.
"The abovementioned instruction to the German regulator was given by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, in which they just recently spoke about the project as about a purely commercial initiative of private investors. Also, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz himself, who directly initiated the abovementioned actions, had assured earlier that the certification process for Nord Stream 2 has exclusively regulatory nature and cannot in any way be connected with the political situation," Zakharova noted.
Qazet.az reports that "The direct political ban on the certification of Nord Stream 2, introduced on February 22, is the logical high point of the aforementioned doctrine of the priority of politics over the economy in the context of its implementation," Zakharova said.