{"id":7726,"date":"2026-04-27T02:38:33","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T02:38:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/7726\/"},"modified":"2026-04-27T02:38:33","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T02:38:33","slug":"kremlin-squeezes-germany-with-oil-cut-to-eastern-regions-politico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/7726\/","title":{"rendered":"Kremlin squeezes Germany with oil cut to eastern regions \u2013 POLITICO"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cBy stopping these shipments and creating obstacles for exports to Germany, the Russians want to fuel the oil crisis,\u201d said Szymon Karda\u015b, an expert on Russia\u2019s energy policy at the European Council of Foreign Relations.<\/p>\n

Germany weaned itself off Russian natural gas and oil in the aftermath of the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But Germany continues to receive a modest amount of Kazakh oil via a branch of the Druzhba pipeline that runs through Russia, giving the Kremlin some remaining leverage over Germany.<\/p>\n

Experts say the Kremlin may now have found an opportunity amid Germany’s fuel crunch to exercise that leverage. News of the cut to Kazakh supply was first reported by Reuters<\/a>. <\/p>\n

“It’s a convenient moment to increase the grief the refineries are in,” said Sergey Vakulenko, a\u00a0senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. But Vakulenko, an oil and gas industry expert, suggested there could be an additional motive.<\/p>\n

If Russia seeks to redirect Kazakh oil supplies to Germany via alternative channels, the shipments would likely need to transit through Baltic ports such as Ust-Luga or Primorsk, which have increasingly come under attack<\/a> by the Ukrainian military as it looks to cut the oil revenue the Kremlin is using to fund its war.<\/p>\n

If Germany were also to need these ports to receive Kazakh oil, that could potentially pressure the Ukrainians to stop their drone attacks on these ports, Vakulenko said, acting as a kind of “shield” for Moscow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cBy stopping these shipments and creating obstacles for exports to Germany, the Russians want to fuel the oil…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7727,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1291,421,1646,393,2374,5,3523,188,1459,2241,7630,622,1831,3469,1801,409,2379,484],"class_list":["post-7726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-germany","tag-diesel","tag-drones","tag-energy","tag-friedrich-merz","tag-fuels","tag-germany","tag-infrastructure","tag-kazakhstan","tag-kremlin","tag-oil","tag-pipelines","tag-ports","tag-russia","tag-shipping","tag-vladimir-putin","tag-war","tag-war-in-iran","tag-war-in-ukraine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7726\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}