Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Zuzanne Munchank and Jack Smith.

Today we want to talk about how Germany is planning to bust the EU sanctions on the ruble payments or the EU decision on ruble payments for Russian gas deliveries.

People are saying, you know, governments are saying, oh yeah, we are paying in euros, but it's not quite what it seems, is it, Jack?

Yeah, exactly. So I think it's worth me explaining three different things. The first thing is

what Russia has actually demanded of suppliers,

like how the mechanism actually works. The second thing is how this sits with the sanctions,

what the commission has said about this, the European Commission, and why the European Commission's

opinion on the matter of sanctions in

particular is so important. And then the third thing, which is on the German side, is what

Unipair, who is Germany's largest buyer of Russian natural gas, has said so far about what their

plans are. Okay, so first off, as a quick public service announcement

on this, because I think a lot of people haven't actually read the Russian decree, Reuters,

back when the Russian decree was released at the end of March, made an English translation

of the decree available.

So if you search for it, you can find it.

Should you want to read it yourself, it's not that long.

But the way the decree basically works is it mandates buyers of gas from kind of quote-unquote unfriendly countries to request to open a special type of

account at Gazprom Bank through which they would pay for their kind of gas supplies.

Now, this type of account, which is called the type K account in the

decree, consists of a euro component and a Russian ruble component. What happens is that the supplier

pays into this account in whichever currency is denominated in their contract, dollars or euros. Then

Gazprom bank, you know,

...