Transneft stopped pumping oil to Poland via Druzhba due to lack of payment

“Transneft“was supposed to pump oil to Polish refineries in the last ten days of February, but route orders with payment were not issued, so pumping was stopped, informed official representative of the company Igor Demin in a comment to TASS.

“Based on the schedule, pumping to Polish refineries was to be carried out in the last ten days of February. However, itinerary orders with a confirmed resource and payment for transit were not issued. In addition, operational changes were made to the schedule, excluding deliveries for Polish consumers,” he said.

Because of this, oil is not transported in the direction of Poland, Demin concluded.

On the suspension of oil exports from Russia to Poland on February 25 informed Daniel Obaitek, chairman of the board of the Polish oil refinery Orlen. According to him, only 10% of the consumed raw materials came from Russia, it will be replaced by oil from other directions.

At the end of March last year, Prime Minister of Poland Mateusz Morawiecki announced plans to stop deliveries of energy carriers from Russia: to abandon Russian oil by the end of the year, and coal and gas by May. In April, Obaitek said that Orlen had reduced the share of Russian raw materials used at its refineries to 30%. On the day the hostilities began, February 24, Orlen suspended purchases of Russian oil shipped by sea and ordered 28 tankers from “alternative” destinations.

At the same time, in December 2022, Transneft President Nikolai Tokarev said that companies from Poland and Germany filed applications inTransneft” for the pumping of 3 million tons of oil through the Druzhba in 2023. Applications were received after the authorities of these countries announced plans to abandon Russian pipeline oil. Over the 29 days of January, oil supplies to Poland through the pipeline amounted to about 490,000 tons. This is almost half of the plan for pumping for the first quarter of 2023 (990,000 tons).

The Druzhba pipeline was built in the 1960s. for the delivery of oil from the USSR to the countries of the socialist camp in Eastern Europe. It starts in the Samara region and passes through Bryansk, and then splits into two branches: northern and southern. The northern branch passes through Belarus to Poland, Germany and the Baltic countries, the southern branch passes through the territory of Ukraine to the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia.

How wrote Earlier, Vedomosti, oil supplies via Druzhba to Germany ceased from the beginning of 2023.