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

Today we want to talk about gas, the cut of Russian gas, the reduction in gas volumes to Germany in particular,

and about Sunday's second round of the French parliamentary elections. Jack, you've been writing about gas this morning, or for the last few days,

and about the cut in gas, which initially sounded like a technical thing,

or at least we weren't sure.

There was always the suspicion when something like that happens.

Now it's very clear it seems that this is a political decision.

So what do you think is the background of this and what do you think is going to happen?

Yeah. So, you know, firstly, for a bit of context for anybody who's not particularly kind of

O'Fey with gas, there are kind of basically four main pipeline routes by which Russian gas enters the European

Union right. So the biggest of these routes is Nord Stream, which sometimes for sake of

clarity we call Nord Stream 1 to differentiate from Nord Stream 2. That runs from a city called

Weyborg in Russia to Germany. There is Yomal Europe, which runs through kind of basically through Belarus to Poland and then on to Germany at Malniv.

And then there is the Ukraine Transit Network, which we kind of treat as like one big amalgam.

And that kind of the biggest entry point to the EU is in a slowback town called belki caposani and we also

have turk stream which as the name suggests runs from kind of near crassadar in the black sea to

turkey um so the biggest of these by far by volume is. Now, there had been a lot of kind of variability and

choppiness on the Ukraine transit in Yomal Europe. In fact, about a month or so ago, Russia effectively

shut Yomal Europe down entirely by passing sanctions against the operator of the Polish section

of that pipeline. But, you know, for most of the operator of the Polish section of that pipeline.

But for most of the kind of recent crisis, gas flows through Nord Stream had been pretty much at their maximum capacity, right?

Now this changed this week.

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