Headmistress Natalia Pałczyńska was in shock after the heating and hot water at her elementary school went out without warning on Wednesday. “We were completely surprised,” she said. If the gas doesn’t start flowing again soon, “we will have no choice but to close our doors until it does,” she said.
The school in Mieśisku, a village in western Poland, was in one of about 10 administrative districts where homes, health centers, kindergartens and local businesses – as well as thousands of residents – lost heat after Moscow cut off gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria 8 p.m. on Wednesday. The affected area was relatively small and unusual in that it depended solely on Russia for gas. But it was seen as an indication of what could happen more broadly if Moscow cut supplies to countries far more dependent than Poland, which gets 40% of its gas needs from Russia but consumes only 9% of its gas needs for energy.
Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki complained about a “direct attack”, accused Russia of “putting a gun to our heads” but said Poland “will manage that the Polish people don’t feel any change” and urged Poles to do so Attack TV speech: “Please don’t be afraid”.
But at least in Mieśisku the fear was palpable. The mayor’s office phones rang constantly as local residents called to say that, as a local woman told Polish TV, they had been “turned off by Putin.”
The Kremlin said it stopped supplies because Warsaw and Sofia did not respond to their demands to pay for gas in rubles. The two EU members, who have been among the most vocal in support of a swift withdrawal from Russian gas, said they would not give in to blackmail and said they could take the provocative move.
But it has brought Europe to the brink of an energy crisis, resulting in a 20% surge in the already rising wholesale price of gas. There are fears that Russia could do the same elsewhere, such as towards Gazprom’s main customer in Europe, Germany – which gets 55% of its gas from Russia and has paid it €5 billion for gas and oil since the start of the Ukraine conflict – or to others, such as Italy, Finland, Croatia or Latvia, which are also heavily dependent on Moscow.
Industry in Poland shows a brave face. “We are well prepared for this,” said Tomasz Zieliński, Chairman of the Board of the Polish Chemical Industry Chamber, which represents around 13,000 companies and more than 320,000 jobs. In his office in downtown Warsaw, he stated that Poland’s gas storage facilities were 76% full, compared to an EU average of just 30% (33% in Germany). The government has been working with companies for years to reduce their dependence on Russia, he said.
Russia gas supplies in Europe
In 2015, a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal was opened in the north-western port city of Świnoujście near the German border, which can meet a quarter of Poland’s gas needs. It is lengthened to increase uptake by about 10%. Footage of its snaking yellow pipes has often provided the backdrop for current TV reports and government interviews trying to calm Poles. It has become something of a symbol of the nation’s hope in bezpieczeństwo energetyczne (Energy Security), the new buzzword.
The widely acclaimed Baltic Sea pipeline, which is the answer to the German-Russian Nord Steam 2 project, is scheduled to go into operation this fall. It will run from Norway via Denmark to Poland and will be able to transport around 10 billion cubic meters of gas annually, around half of the country’s needs. Another pipeline nearing completion will connect Poland to the LNG terminal in the Lithuanian port city of Klaipeda, and existing pipelines connect Poland to Germany and the Czech Republic.
“Poland was not surprised by what happened, it was something that was always expected,” said Joanna Maćkowiak-Pandera, head of Forum Energii, a business, government and academic NGO focused on the energy transition. Last but not least, she hoped it could accelerate Poland’s slow decarbonization efforts, she said, because “most people now realize that selling fossil fuels has literally fueled Russian aggression.”
The image being projected of business and politics may be stoic and has helped unify a polarized country, but “the atmosphere is extremely nervous,” she said.
Interview requests for 12 manufacturers heavily dependent on gas, ranging from glass to carton makers, were turned down, with one admitting that “the issue is too sensitive at this time” to talk about it.
The government has downplayed Poland’s reliance on Russian coal, Maćkowiak-Pandera said, which supplements insufficient domestic supplies and is used to heat a large percentage of Polish homes. “It’s only recently that people have become aware that it’s Russian coal that’s giving us our dirty air and there’s a lot of pressure to stop it,” she said. “In a way, that’s more important to us than the gas issue.”
She asked if the national initiative for derusyfikacja (de-russification) would put the issue of dekarbonizacja (decarbonization) on the agenda and further increase demand for coal or, she hoped, help dissuade Poland. Support for phasing out Russian coal is high – 94% of citizens said they were willing to pay more to deviate from Russian supplies in a recent poll. “But nobody says how much they would be willing to pay,” she said. Household coal prices have already increased by 300% in the past year. “As a result, we expect a lot of fuel poverty in the coming winter.”
There is speculation that maniacal efforts to meet rising demand for coal may have caused two deadly explosions at mines in Silesia, southern Poland, last week, killing 18 miners while seven others are still missing.
Bernard Swolzyna, an energy engineer at progressive think tank Instrat, said that while he must have been shocked by the events that propelled them forward, “a dramatic shift in the discourse window is happening in Poland right now”. The idea of ”deviating from fossil fuels from Russia was a fringe idea until recently, and now it’s seen as a baseline,” he said.
Poland has spent years telling its neighbors that Europe needs to move away from Russian supplies. The word niepodleglosc (independence) has a deeply emotional connotation linked to Poland’s past under the yoke of foreign powers, most recently the Soviet Union. Nowadays it is often used in connection with the energy debate.
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From the very beginning, because of history, trust in Russia was low, but everyday experience did not help. In the past 18 years, Russian gas has stopped flowing at least seven times, sometimes for a few days, once for half a year. “We absolutely wanted to be independent, for which we were sometimes accused of Russophobia, especially by German politicians. But this idea never flew to the financial markets because the driving force was the low price,” Maćkowiak-Pandera said.
Pawel Rozynski, economic commentator for the conservative daily Rzeczpospolita, said Russia is “like Pablo Escoabar”. “Gas was like our drug and proved very addictive because it was cheap, efficient and greener than other energy sources. Poland had to sober up very quickly…but we lost a lot of time defending coal because we thought it would protect our sovereignty…and one of the side effects will be much higher energy costs.”
For Wojciech Mróz, the cut is most important from a moral and ethical point of view. The 24-year-old space economics student, who runs his own payments start-up Pagaspot, has been at the forefront of a campaign through a Catholic youth organization to help some of the three million Ukrainian refugees border police reports say have been there since the war began arrived in Poland. About 20,000 to 25,000 people are still arriving daily and the numbers are not expected to stop anytime soon.
“It is good that this has happened now as it saves our government from having to take this step itself. And even if it didn’t end the war if we kept stepping on the gas, it wouldn’t have sat well alongside Poland’s tremendous national effort to help Ukrainian refugees and save lives,” he said.
Maks De Doliwa Zieliński, 23, an economics student from Kraków whose recent plans to take a job at a German chemical company in eastern Ukraine were dashed by the war, said the situation at home was creating tension. “My father, a businessman, said we and Europe made a mistake in trusting Russia at all. We should never have done that.” His German mother, he said, disagreed, arguing that Germany nurtured the naïve hope of helping Russia transition to democracy through its close trade ties (the “change through trade”).
“Poland has long yelled at the Germans about the need to diversify, saying Russia is too unpredictable. But as we can now see, business has pushed politics into a dark corner.”