TALLINN, November 3 (RIA Novosti, Nikolai Adashkevich) - Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip said Thursday the Russian-German project to construct a pipeline under the Baltic Sea to deliver Russian natural gas directly to Western Europe posed an environmental threat to the region.
The agreement on the 1200km North European Gas Pipeline (NEG), expected to cost at least 4 billion euros, was signed September 8 by Russian natural gas monopoly Gazprom and German energy companies. It will initially provide gas to Germany, and offshoots may subsequently be built to link it with several other countries.
"A lot of toxic substances were submerged in the Baltic Sea after WWII," the premier said. "In various estimates, about 300,000 metric tons of various kinds of chemical weapons, including around 50,000 metric tons of toxic agents, were buried on the Baltic floor."
The pipeline will inevitably encounter and damage the containers with chemical substances whose exact whereabouts are not known, Ansip said. However, Russia denies the environmental threat, referring to its experience in building the Blue Stream pipeline in the Black Sea.
Ansip claimed the project had not won everybody's support in Germany, and said German President Horst Koeller was one of those critical of it.
Aigar Kalvitis, the Prime Minister of neighboring Latvia, said Thursday the pipeline would endanger regional security and labeled it as a political, rather than economic, decision, an accusation Russia has rejected.
Kalvitis said the Baltic republics (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) and Poland were still trying to persuade relevant EU bodies that the project must be dropped.
Latvia's Foreign Ministry issued a statement earlier on Thursday saying all EU countries needed to be engaged in such a large-scale project, and pressed for a revision of the project to include Latvia's natural gas terminal on the Baltic coast.
Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski also criticized Russia and Germany for ignoring their European partners' economic interest in such an large-scale project.
A Latvian political pundit qualified the deal as "an expensive and dangerous game" being played by the two countries. He said laying the pipe through the Baltic countries would have cost 2.2 billion euros, whereas building it to bypass the countries would be approximately three times as expensive.
