October 15 marks the 60th anniversary of the inauguration of the Druzhba (‘Friendship’) oil pipeline. Conceived in 1958 at a meeting of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance – the Soviet-led analogue to Western European integration, Druzhba helped forge closer economic links between the USSR and its Eastern European allies, and eventually, between Russia and the whole of Europe.
Drawn up to aid an economic boom being experienced by Eastern Europe, Druzhba was built to replace more costly and infrastructure-intensive rail-based oil deliveries.
Sourcing oil from the Volga-Ural oil and gas basin and starting off in Almetyevsk, modern-day Tatarstan, Druzhba runs west to Mozyr in Belarus, where it splits into two routes – one to eastern Germany via Poland, and another through Ukraine toward Bratislava in Slovakia, Prague in the Czech Republic and Budapest in Hungary.
The US sought to sanction the project into submission, slapping restrictions on Western European sales of large-diameter pipes to the Eastern Bloc after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Russian Chelyabinsk’s industrialists saved the day, creating pipes of the necessary diameter.
The success of the project led to the construction of a second line – known as Druzhba-2 and running along the same route, in 1974.
This allowed the region to build tens of millions of new apartments, industrial goods and finished products ranging from cars and electronics to household appliances.
Worker assembles an FSO Polonez automobile in Poland, 1970s. Poland and much of the rest of Eastern Europe were able to largely avoid the energy shocks that crippled Western economies during the period thanks to Soviet oil deliveries, including supplies delivered via the Druzhba oil pipeline.
© Photo : Jerzy Baczyński, Marek Dunin-Wąsowicz, Zakłady Przemysłowe Warszawy, Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza, Warszawa 1980.
After the USSR’s collapse, Germany’s reunification and the European Union’s expansion, Druzhba became a key source of fuel for Europe’s economic prosperity, helping Eastern Europe with its difficult transition to the market, and Germany in its effort to build on its status as an industrial powerhouse.
Accounting for expansions (including extensions to deliver oil to southern Germany and Austria), Druzhba holds the record as the longest oil pipeline network in the world, consisting of a whopping 8,900 km of pipe, 46 pumping stations, 38 intermediate pumping stations, and reservoirs that can hold up to 1.5 million cubic meters of oil.
A section of the Druzhba pipeline being erected in Carpathia over a local waterway. September 1962.
© Sputnik / I. Arons
The pipeline has an estimated capacity to pump up to 2 million barrels per day, or nearly a fifth of Russia’s total oil output. Until recently, it accounted for up to half of all Russian oil exports.
Killing Druzhba?
The US, the EU and Ukraine have taken a series of steps to try and effectively kill the Druzhba-based energy partnership between Russia and Europe, with the EU banning deliveries of Russian oil through the northern portion of the pipeline in the summer of 2024, and Ukraine raising transit costs by more than 75%, and in July 2024 prohibiting supplies of Lukoil oil through the pipeline’s southern line to Hungary and Slovakia.