Helmut Kohl: North-European gas pipeline not spearheaded against Polish interests

German ex-Chancellor Helmut Kohl last evening at an ecumenical congress in the Polish city of Gnezno said, the project of building a North-European gas pipeline along the Baltic Sea bed from Russian Vyborg to north German Graifswald is not spearheaded against Polish interests. According to the ex-chancellor, the project is of purely economic nature and does not mean at all “a new edition of the Moscow-Berlin axis”. Kohl called an absurdity an idea that Germany and Russia can form such an axis to the detriment of Poland.

The agreement on construction of a gas pipeline between the Russian mammoth Gazprom Company and the German concerns FASF and E.ON was signed on September 8 in Berlin in the presence of Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. The project provides for laying one run of the pipeline 1,200 kilometers long by 2010, which will pump annually 27.5 billion cubic meters of gas. After the second run of the pipeline is put into operation, the throughput capacity of the gas pipeline will rise to 55 billion cubic meters annually, reported Itar-Tass.