In a telephone call he requested, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) that he would enact a law according to which gas deliveries would have to be paid for in rubles from April 1st. The Tagesspiegel learned this from government circles. The Kremlin also reported on the phone call.
At the same time, Putin emphasized in the conversation that nothing would change for the European contractual partners. Payments would continue to be made exclusively in euros and, as usual, would be transferred to Gazprom Bank, which is not affected by the western sanctions. The bank then converts the money into rubles.
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Scholz did not expressly agree to this procedure in the conversation, but asked for written information in order to understand the procedure more precisely. The G-7 agreement still applies: Energy supplies are paid exclusively in euros or dollars, as they were before the start of the Ukraine war. As stipulated in the treaties, it was said in German government circles.
It was initially unclear whether this meant that the gas supply stop in the room was off the table for the time being. The federal government has activated the early warning level of the gas emergency plan. A delivery stop could endanger hundreds of thousands of jobs in Germany – at the same time Russia would then miss out on the billions in payments from Germany and other EU countries.
