Nuland: No time or money for pipelines
Visiting US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland laid to rest scenarios about the EastMed and other pipelines in an interview published in the Greek edition of Kathimerini on Wednesday.
“We don’t need to wait for 10 years and spend billions of dollars on this stuff. We need to move the gas now. And we need to use gas today as a transition to a greener future. Ten years from now we don’t want a pipeline. Ten years from now we want to be green,” she said, stressing however that “right now we need the gas.”
“So we’ve got to use LNG and we’ve got to use electricity connections that we can do more quickly,” she said, while also calling for the transfer of natural gas via LNG and the participation of Turkey in cooperation with Greece, Israel, Egypt and Cyprus in a wider context.
She went further, estimating that the region can become an energy engine for Northern Europe.
“The whole neighborhood needs energy and this part of the world can also be an energy engine for Northern Europe. And you see how quickly we have to make that transition away from Russia. Because they’re unreliable suppliers and they’re also an immoral partner as we see,” the US diplomat said.
She also referred to the importance of Alexandroupoli in northern Greece and the military bases used by the US Armed Forces in Greece, both to provide security in the region and for the transfer of military forces to Eastern Europe and Ukraine.
“The fact that we have a completely different, richer, deeper defense relationship with Greece than we had just a few years ago has changed not only what we can and are able to do together, but Greece’s ability to become a security provider throughout Southeastern Europe. Without that relationship we wouldn’t have been able to get more security support to Ukraine, literally within two days of Zelenskyy’s request,” she concluded.
