Pijplijn voor gasaanvoer tussen Rusland en Duitsland wekt woede Poolse regering (en)

Russia and Germany will on Thursday (8 September) sign a deal on a gas pipeline directly linking the two countries - to the dismay of Poland.

Russian president Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder will today in Berlin attend the signing of 5bn dollar deal between Gazprom, a Russian gas monopolist, and Germany's chemicals giant BASF and energy firm E.ON.

The 1,200 km pipeline will link St. Petersburg in Russia directly via the Baltic sea to Greifswald in Germany

The scheme has huge strategic importance as the direct pipeline will bypass EU states which have difficult relations with Moscow, such as Poland and the Ukraine.

"It will help us avoid all the complications with those countries and deal directly with the Germans," Alexei Makarkin, analyst at the Centre for Political Technologies in Moscow told the Guardian.

The bilateral move has sparked strong criticism in Poland, which fears its position vis a vis Moscow will be weakened by the German-Russian deal.

Polish president Alexander Kwasniewski yesterday rebuffed the German stance, stating:

"From the point of view of the European Union (...) of common EU policy toward Russia, it is not a good situation if one EU member, an important country, Germany, conducts such a policy over our heads and over EU heads."

The Polish president reportedly asked German conservative leader Angela Merkel, polled to win Germany's elections on 18 September, to cancel the deal once elected.

Mr Schroder, reacting to Polish concerns, wrote today in an article in Germany daily Handelsblatt that the pipeline represented a "project of European dimension, directed against nobody, which should be open to later participation of third countries."

The German chancellor went on to write that the project served "the strategic goal of an energy alliance between the European Union and Russia as part of a pan-European economic space".

Approximately one quarter of Europe's gas is supplied by Russia.

Poland gets almost all its oil, and 40 percent of its gas, from Moscow through overland pipelines.

The planned St Petersburg - Greifswald pipeline is expected to run from 2010.