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Italy should cut off Russian gas ‘soon’
Italy is ethically obliged to stop buying Russian gas “soon”, the country’s Ecological Transition Minister Roberto Cingolani said in an interview today.
“I think that we will have to stop supplies of gas from Russia soon for ethical reasons,” he told La Stampa newspaper.
The minister is currently on a two-day trip to Angola and Congo Republic seeking energy deals as Italy scrambles to reduce its dependency on Russia, which provides about 45 percent of Italian gas.
“We are diversifying our sources with great speed,” he said.
“It is clear that all of Europe is heavily dependent on Russia for gas, and this has been a major geopolitical mistake made over the past 20 years,” he said.
“It is useless to think that we can solve it in a month. From a certain point of view, however, this money is a lot… we are indirectly financing the war.”
Cingolani predicted the country would no longer need Russian gas within 18 months.
“By the second half of next year we will really begin to have an almost complete independence,” he told La Stampa.
Italy is one of Europe’s biggest guzzlers of gas, which currently represents 42 percent of its energy consumption, and it imports 95 percent of the gas it uses.
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