Russia has suspended electricity supplies to Finland overnight after its energy firm RAO Nordic threatened to cut off supplies over payment arrears, an official for Finland’s grid operator has confirmed.
‘It is at zero at the moment, and that started from midnight as planned,’ Timo Kaukonen, manager for operational planning at Fingrid, disclosed.
Africa Daily News, New York recalls that RAO Nordic had on Friday said it would suspend supplies, citing problems with payments, as Helsinki prepares to announce its application for NATO membership in the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
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But the shortfall was being made up by imports from Sweden. Finland imports about 10 percent of its power from Russia.
RAO Nordic says it has not been paid for electricity since May 6 but has not spelled out if this was linked to European sanctions against Russia.
Moscow’s February 24 invasion has swung political and public opinion in Finland and Sweden in favour of NATO membership as a deterrent against Russian aggression.
Both countries have long cooperated with the Western military alliance and are expected to be able to join it quickly.
NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg has repeatedly said they would be welcomed “with open arms”.
Meanwhile, in a move which analytics have termed as ‘expected’, Russia has openly expelled 10 Romanian diplomats, as well as a Bulgarian, in retaliation for a similar move by the two countries following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The expulsion was also confirmed by Moscow and follows the April 5 expulsion of 10 Russian diplomats “whose activities breached the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations”, according to the Romanian foreign ministry.
The Russian foreign ministry also said on Friday it “firmly rejects the groundless attempts by the Romanian side to blame Russia for war crimes in Ukraine”. It had also slammed “Bucharest’s policy of whitewashing the atrocities committed by [Ukraine’s] national guard against civilians as well as the supply of weapons, equipment and other assistance to the regime in Kyiv”.
Romania summoned the Russian ambassador to Bucharest Valery Kuzmin on Thursday to protest an article published on the Russian embassy website, that said “a stream of outright lies, falsifications, staged provocations, and disinformation” about what was happening in Ukraine was “created and financed by the collective West”.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Western countries have imposed several rounds of sanctions and expelled dozens of Russian diplomats.
