DAccording to Economics Minister Robert Habeck, Germany is now prepared to stop Russian oil supplies. “Today I can say that an embargo has become manageable for Germany,” said the Green politician after a meeting with his Polish colleague Anna Moskwa on Tuesday in Warsaw.
The share of Russian oil is only about twelve percent. And this share falls solely on deliveries for the PCK refinery in Schwedt an der Oder. Here we are looking for an alternative. “This alternative is the task of the next few days.” He assumes that it is actually only a matter of days.
In the run-up to the meeting in Warsaw, it was said that the Polish port of Gdansk could play an important role in ensuring that Schwedt was supplied by ship. Schwedt is connected to a pipeline from Russia and is controlled by the Russian company Rosneft.
A month ago, Habeck said that Germany could become “almost independent” of Russian oil imports by the end of the year. At the beginning of April, the ministry also warned of shortages if the end comes hastily: “An immediate embargo on Russian oil could at least temporarily lead to market distortions and bottlenecks in the supply of oil products in eastern and central Germany.”
Ever since the start of the Russian war of aggression, economists have advocated stopping energy supplies from Russia. Austrian economists are currently demanding an EU oil embargo against Russia in an open letter: The next step in sanctions would be to stop EU imports of crude oil and oil products from Russia “or at least high EU import tariffs” and hit Russia hard, since oil exports are bad for its foreign exchange earnings and the War financing is much more important than the export of coal or gas. This is what the directors of the economic research institute WIFO, Gabriel Felbermayr, and the Vienna Institute for Comparative Economic Research, Mario Holzner, are demanding. Austria no longer imports Russian oil.
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