Russia’s state-controlled gas giant said Friday it has completed the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany, a contentious project that Ukraine and the United States have strongly opposed.
Gazprom said in a statement on the messaging app Telegram, citing its CEO Alexei Miller, that the construction of Nord Stream 2 was “fully completed” on Friday morning.
Owned by Gazprom, with investment from several European companies, Nord Stream 2 is built under the Baltic Sea and bypasses Poland and Ukraine, raising objections from both those countries.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has described the new pipeline as a powerful geopolitical weapon for Russia, which annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 after the ouster of the former Kremlin-friendly president and has thrown its weight behind a separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine.
