Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said today that he will have to talk to Russian President Vladimir Putin about US sanctions against Serbian oil company NIS (Petrol Industry of Serbia), if they are introduced, and about the gas agreement between Serbia and Russia, TANJUG reported. He asked the Serbian government to create a team that would be responsible for resolving the situation in case the US imposes sanctions against NIS.
“We will see if I will talk to him (Putin) on the phone or in some other way, but in any case I have to talk to him“, Vucic stressed at a meeting of the Serbian government today.
Serbia is almost entirely dependent on Russian gas, which it receives via pipelines from neighboring countries. The gas is then distributed by the NIS company, whose majority owner is the Russian state oil monopoly “Gazprom Neft“.
Vucic said he hopes to see Prime Minister Miloš Vučević at the head of the team to resolve the situation with US sanctions, as well as non-governmental representatives – “people who are able to negotiate with the Russians on the one hand and with the Americans on the other“.
“Make a bigger team and prepare for something that will be of extremely great importance for us and will be a huge challenge for both the government and the country. We cannot afford to run out of oil or use our oil reserves and not have security“, the Serbian president stressed.
According to data from the Central Depository “Gazprom Neft“ and “Gazprom“ own 56.15 percent of the ownership in NIS, and 29.87 percent is owned by Serbia. “Gazprom Neft“ was blacklisted by the European Union and the United States in 2014 after Russia annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Belgrade has refused to join Western sanctions against Moscow and continues to maintain ties with officials in the Kremlin.
The Serbian president indicated today that the country should prepare for talks with Russia and “try to reach a new three-year agreement, bearing in mind that we are using more and more gas, both because of gas power plants in the future, and because of the possibility of supplies through the Bulgarian interconnector, because of gas supplies from Azerbaijan through Bulgaria, as well as because of the possible construction of a gas power plant in the city of Niš“.