Quote Originally Posted by Hanna View Post
Ok but is South Stream actually cancelled then?

Bulgaria suddenly decided to sign the agreement....

Or was that just because they realised that Russia found a workaround with Turkey (that was genius).

And isn't it an irony that nobody every complained about buying gas and oil from the USSR, was always done in my childhood despite we were not allies of the USSR. But it was business and convenient and the arrangement worked well for everybody. Now suddenly we can't buy gas from democratic modern Russia.
South Stream is not cancelled. The only thing that Bulgaria was blocking is the underwater pipeline. But they did agree to connect with the pipeline that will run under Turkish terretorial waters. The part of the South Stream pipeline, running through Bulgaria, was never cancelled.
So all Russia has to do now is build the underwater pipeline, along the Turkish coastline, and Bulgaria will allow it to be hooked up to the pipeline running through Bulgaria.
So yeah, there will be a South Stream pipeline running through Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Hungary to supply gas to southern Europe.

The EU is already having serious economic issues so I really don't get why they risked losing the cheap gas from Russia. It was a really brain-dead thing to do.
And there will probaly be even more economic issues caused by the sanctions since Russia is becoming more self-sustaining and moving it's economy eastward. The sanctions damaged Europe and they didn't change Russia's policies so the sanctions were fail-fail.