Page 103 - RusRPTOct21

Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur) (BNA) has commenced the process of certification of the Nord Stream 2 which said it has up to four months from Sept. 8 to produce a draft decision on the application.
Gazprom may have to wait until mid-winter for Nord Stream 2 to be commissioned. Germany's energy regulator said Monday said it has until January 8 to complete a certification of the trans-Baltic pipeline, Reuters reports from Frankfurt. The regulator must ensure that Nord Stream complies with European Union rules requiring pipeline owners to be separate from gas suppliers when it reaches German waters. After the regulator completes its inspection, it will send a draft decision to the European Commission.
Belarus will buy more than $1bn dollars of military hardware from Russia, said the self-proclaimed President Alexander Lukashenko. The main purchase will include weapons to be placed near theorderetweenelarus and Ukraine, reported Ukrainska Pravda. In addition to this Belarus will also have Russian S-400 anti-aircraft missile systems. The same system was sold to Turkey and created a crisis in relations between Ankara and NATO.
Russia and Belarus have set the price for deliveries of Russian gas to Belarus at $128.5/kcm for 2022, Kommersant reports. The price will thus remain at the current level and will note indexed for inflation. At the same time, the two countries did not agree on terms for integrating their energy and, in particular, gas markets. The document on the creation of a unified market is toe signedy 1 December 2023, per Vedomosti, with all the key principles determined by July 2022. The point of contention might be the gas price Belarus insists on buying gas at Gazprom's tariff for the Smolensk Region ($68/kcm), while Gazprom wants to sell gas at the netback at the Germanorder. Another discussed solution is to fix the gas transport tariff to Belarus. In 2019 and 2020, Gazprom sold 20.3bcm and 18.8bcm of gas to Belarus (10.1bcm in 1H21). From the financial standpoint, the worst-case scenario for Gazprom woulde switchingelarusian deliveries to the Russian gas tariff. We estimate that, if volumes remain at historical levels, Gazprom could lose around $1bn of EBITDA, or 3%, starting from 2024 in such a case. However, given that no details on gas prices in the unified market have been determined so far, for now we assume that the price for Belarus remains at the current level in $. We treat the news as not market-moving at this point.
Nord Stream 2 completed on September 7. The controversial Nord Stream 2 Russo-German pipeline haseen completed. The last pipe section was welded
103 RUSSIA Country Report October 2021 www.intellinews.com