Russian oil supplies to Poland and Germany have been cut at Poland's eastern border with Belarus, Polish pipeline company PERN said, and a Russian company has accused Belarus of diverting the flow. In a new twist to tension between Minsk and Moscow over oil supplies and transit to western Europe, PERN spokesman Tomasz Zakrzewski told AFP on Monday: "Deliveries were disrupted overnight and then totally cut off Monday morning on the main Druzhba pipeline, which supplies crude oil to Poland and Germany.
"Fifty million tonnes of crude pass through the Druzhba pipeline each year. Of that, 18 million tonnes are supplied to Poland and 22 million tonnes to the German refineries of Schwedt and Mider Spergau," he said.
Polish oil groups Orlen and Lotos receive Russian crude through the Druzhba pipeline, which first came onstream in 1964.
Russian pipeline operator Transneft accused Belarus of siphoning oil from the pipeline.
"Since January 6, the Belarussian side has unilaterally, and without warning anyone, begun illegally siphoning oil from the Druzhba pipeline, which is solely for transport to customers in western Europe," Transneft head Semyon Vainshtok was quoted as saying Monday by the RIA Novosti news agency.
But the head engineer at Belarus' Gomel Transneft Druzhba, which operates the pipeline, said oil supplies to Poland and Germany had only been reduced, on orders from state energy company Belneftekhim, not completely halted.
"We did not cut it off. We are working. But there has been a reduction," Alexander Bordovsky told AFP.
The development comes amid a row between Minsk and Moscow over Russian crude which is pumped through Belarus on its way to customers in the European Union.
About 100 million tonnes of Russian crude pass through pipelines in Belarus each year on the way west to customers in the Czech Republic, Lithuania and Slovakia, as well as Germany and Poland.
At the beginning of the year, Belarus slapped a transit tax on Russian crude that passes through the country in response to a Russian decision to impose export duties on crude oil that Belarus buys from Russia.
The row over transit fees came just days after Belarus had narrowly averted a cut-off in Russian natural gas supplies by agreeing to a demand by Russian monopoly Gazprom that Minsk pay double last year's price for imported gas.
The Polish economy ministry issued a statement Monday assuring that "Polish refineries have sufficient reserves" to continue functioning normally until crude supplies can be restored via a Baltic Sea terminal.
"Poland also has strategic oil and gasoline stocks for 80 days, which will be used in the event of need," the statement said.
A different section of the Druzhba pipeline near Russia's border with Belarus ruptured in July last year, causing the flow of Russian crude to the Mazeikiu Nafta refinery in Lithuania to be cut off.
That interruption to supplies occurred shortly after Poland's Orlen had signed an agreement to buy the Baltic oil facility from bankrupt Russian oil company Yukos.
Supplies by the pipeline to Mazeikiu have not yet been restored, affecting -- along with other incidents -- the Baltic oil complex's bottom line, which has been forecast to be 20 percent down in 2006 compared with the results the previous year.
Officials in Lithuania have speculated that the halt in supplies to Mazeikiu was politically motivated because Moscow was irked that the Baltic oil group had been sold to a Polish firm, not one of the Russian ones that had bid for it, and that Yukos had skirted the Russian legal system when it sold Mazeikiu.
The Russians, on the other hand, have blamed last year's cut-off on technical problems, with Oleg Mitval of the Russian natural resources ministry saying last July that "hundreds of faults" had been discovered on the ageing pipeline.
