European Commission is ready to act "within a matter of days" if proposed new US sanctions on Russia undermined the bloc's interests, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said in a statement.
"The US bill could have unintended unilateral effects that impact the EU's energy security interests," he said in a statement after a meeting of European Commissioners.
"This is why the Commission concluded today that if our concerns are not taken into account sufficiently, we stand ready to act appropriately within a matter of days. America first cannot mean that Europe's interests come last," the statement reads.
The US House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to slap new sanctions on Russia today, which could affect European firms.
The director of the Institute of Political Studies Sergei Markov, speaking with a correspondent of Vestnik Kavkaza, explained that by doing this, Europe wants to take its companies out from under attack, or at least mitigate it.
The expert stressed that Brussels understands that the appeal of the bill's authors to the care of Europe's energy security is a lie. "Europe's energy security is undermined when the US tries to limit the EU energy sources and reorient it to the US LNG. Since Washington is trying not to increase but reduce alternative, it certainly strikes a blow to Europe's energy security," he said.
Accordingly, the Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline project is put forward to the center of political battles due to the US bill. "It's hard to tell the result of these battles. Of course, the European Union is interested in North Stream 2, although on its own terms. But now it is impossible to predict the future of the project," Sergei Markov warned.
A senior research fellow at the European Research Centre of the International Relations Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Vladimir Olenchenko, in turn, stressed the European Union's concern about the harm that the tightening of US sanctions could inflict on its economic interests.
"And Brussels may suffer not only from anti-Russian sanctions, but also from restrictions on Iran, with which the EU is actively cooperating," the expert noted.
According to him, the main thing the EU is worried about concerning Washington's new anti-Russian sanctions is Europe's energy security. "The underlying reason for US sanctions against Russia is to narrow the possibility of exporting Russian gas to Europe and try to replace it with American LNG. However, it is significantly more expensive, plus logistics costs. In order to equalize the chances, Americans are trying to create such conditions, under which it would be unprofitable for Europe to buy Russian gas," the senior research fellow at the European Research Centre of the International Relations Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences said.
Olenchenko specified that the EU also may introduce some conditions that make the purchase of US gas unprofitable.
One way or another, but American sanctions, if come into force, could significantly slow down the implementation of the Nord Stream-2 project, he said. "Whenever any project is implemented, financing is always the most important issue. And one of the areas of the US sanctions is the difficulty of lending, which is not very good for long-term projects," Vladimir Olenchenko said.
