Slovakia’s gas transit company SPP said Thursday the country was now getting Russian gas via Turkey after Ukraine halted flows through its territory, Agence France-Presse reported.
Ukraine, battling a Russian invasion since February 2022, stopped supplies to the West at the beginning of the year, dealing a blow to the heavily dependent Slovakia.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the move was designed to prevent Moscow from raising money to finance the war.
EU member Slovakia slammed the decision.
Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico — one of the Kremlin’s few allies in the European Union — travelled to Moscow late last year to negotiate supplies with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Russia’s “Gazprom export company has partly renewed gas supplies for SPP,” SPP spokesman Ondrej Sebesta told AFP on Thursday.
“They are conducted by the southern route through TurkStream and via Hungary to Slovakia,” he added, declining to go into detail.
Slovak daily Dennik N quoted SPP chief executive Vojtech Ferencz as saying the supplies via TurkStream had started on February 1 and that the volume would double in April.
TurkStream runs for 930 kilometers (580 miles) under the Black Sea from the Russian resort city of Anapa to Kıyıköy in northwestern Turkey.
It then connects to overground pipelines that run up through the Balkans to Europe, supplying EU member Hungary, Slovakia’s southern neighbor.
The nationalist-leaning Fico, who leads a wobbly three-party coalition cabinet, has also bemoaned the loss of fees for gas transit further west via his country.
His trip to Moscow sparked nationwide protests in Slovakia in January, with tens of thousands taking to the streets and calling on him to step down.