Russian military jets fly on fuel delivered by Wintershall Dea, journalists' investigation claims; co. denies allegations
Business as usual: Russian jets fly on German-supplied fuel, 5 November 2022
Wintershall Dea is a German company involved in a joint venture with a Gazprom subsidiary. Gazprom, the Kremlin-controlled natural gas distributor, is also Russia's main producer of aviation fuel. According to an investigation carried out by the German Der Spiegel weekly and the ZDF public TV channel, Wintershall Dea is, jointly with Gazprom, extracting gas from West Siberian gas fields and selling gas condensate, a byproduct of extracting natural gas and one of the basic materials used in the production of jet fuel, to Russian jet fuel manufacturers.
Wintershall Dea responded to this by saying that they are selling the gas condensate to Gazprom, and because the issue is related to a joint venture, it is not possible for them to suspend deliveries to Gazprom on its own, nor does it have any influence on production...
Wintershall Dea also ruled out the suspension of production in Russia, even though they do have the option of withdrawing from the joint venture entirely, but will not do so, as it would lose them a lot of money in the process.
This comes eight months after a news show produced by German public broadcaster ZDF revealed that the fighter jets that flew the attack on Chernihiv, a city northwest of Kyiv and an important cultural centre, have likely been fueled with fuel from Gazprom...
Wintershall Dea, a company that is majority-owned by German chemical giant BASF, questions whether there is a direct link between the gas condensate production in question and the Russian attacks. As the company has also stated, it could not guarantee the gas condensate extracted by Wintershall Dea would not be used for military purposes, as it is “further processed into many different petrochemical products”...
...[T]he joint investigation by Der Spiegel and ZDF found traces of several Gazprom deliveries to Russian military bases near the Ukrainian border, not only ones that were used to launch a deadly attack on Chernihiv, but also the attack on the theatre in Mariupol in March, which killed hundreds of people, including numerous children...