The Russian state-owned company Gazprom will no longer supply gas to the Danish supplier Ørsted and Shell Energy Europe from this Wednesday.

Germany is also affected.

Ørsted and Shell have informed Gazprom Export that they will not pay the invoices in rubles, as Moscow has requested, the Russian company announced on Tuesday.

Shell informed that gas supplies to Germany would not be paid for in Russian currency, Gazprom Export said.

The maximum delivery volume per year under the contract is 1.2 billion cubic meters of gas.

Because no money had flowed for the month of April, deliveries would now be stopped.

As reported by Ørsted, Gazprom has informed the Danish group that it will stop gas deliveries this Wednesday morning at 6 a.m.

Gazprom has maintained its demand that gas be paid for in rubles, but Ørsted is not contractually obliged to do so and will continue to pay in euros.

The situation underscores the need for the EU to become independent of Russian gas through the accelerated expansion of renewable energies, said CEO Mads Nipper.

Danes continue to get gas

Supply bottlenecks are not expected in Denmark.

According to Ørsted, Russia cannot directly cut off gas supplies to Denmark because there is no gas pipeline leading directly from the energy superpower to the country.

Denmark is therefore still able to obtain gas.

However, this would then have to be purchased on a larger scale on the European gas market.

In response to sanctions over Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine, Moscow has ordered European countries to pay for energy in Russian currency.

Otherwise the delivery stop was threatened.

The Dutch gas company GasTerra announced on Monday that Gazprom would not deliver two billion cubic meters of gas to the Netherlands.

Energy supplies had previously been stopped for Poland, Bulgaria and Finland.

The energy companies Uniper and RWE have meanwhile changed their payments for Russian natural gas according to their own information so that they comply with the new requirements from Russia as well as the Western sanctions due to the war in Ukraine.

Uniper announced that it would pay “in euros in accordance with the new payment mechanism”.

The first payment was made at the end of May.

In this way, Uniper is acting in compliance with the sanctions and can continue to guarantee timely fulfillment of the contract.

"The procedure had been agreed in advance with the federal government and follows the relevant EU guidelines." The company did not want to comment on the details of the payments.

Germany's largest electricity supplier RWE also stated that it had changed its payment method to the new requirements.

"We confirm that we have paid euros into the account," the company said.

The company announced two weeks ago that it had opened a euro account in Russia for future payments.

Against the background of the Ukraine war, Russia had demanded that countries classified as unfriendly, such as Germany, switch to ruble payments.

The state gas giant Gazprom has turned off the gas supply to Poland, Bulgaria and Finland, among others, after they rejected the demand.