RUSSIA RESTORES GAS TO ARMENIA AFTER PIPELINE MINED
By Conor Humphries
Reuters
Mon Dec 14, 2009 7:19pm GMT
MOSCOW
Russian gas supplies to ally Armenia were restored on Monday after
being severed for a day when bombs were found under a pipeline in
the volatile southern region of Ingushetia.
Armenia gets around 2 billion cubic metres of gas annually from
Russia, but customers were not affected, said Shushanik Sardaryan,
a spokeswoman for ArmRosGazprom, a subsidiary of Russian gas monopoly
Gazprom.
"The supply of gas to Armenia has now restarted," she said on Monday.
Continued…
Russian police defused two bombs and searched the area for other
explosive devices, after the Mozdok-Tbilisi pipeline was shut down
on Sunday, a police official in Ingushetia told Reuters.
Officials then worked to restore the flow of gas in the pipeline which
also serves customers in Russia’s North Ossetia and Ingushetia regions,
an official for local gas firm Ingushneftegaz said.
Supplies of Russian gas to its ex-Soviet neighbours have been disrupted
at various times in recent years by security scares and by political
disputes.
Russia cut supplies to parts of the European Union last winter during
a pricing dispute with Ukraine. Gazprom stopped buying gas from
Turkmenistan in April after a pipeline explosion sparked a broader
diplomatic row over gas.
The mainly Muslim region of Ingushetia, which borders Chechnya, has
seen a surge in attacks in recent months blamed on Islamist rebels
who have promised to attack economic targets.
Georgia, which also receives gas from the pipeline, has not been
affected by the cut, a spokeswoman for the Georgian Oil and Gas
Corporation told Interfax news agency. (Reporting by Hasmik Mkrtchan
in Yerevan and Conor Humphries in Moscow).