French energy giant accused of fuelling Russian bombers

A Russian gas field partly owned by France’s TotalEnergies is being used to produce fuel for bombers striking targets in Ukraine, Le Monde daily reported Wednesday, a claim contested by the company.

Hydrocarbons from the Termokarstovoye gas field in Siberia are transformed into jet fuel, which can ultimately be tracked to two military airbases near the Ukrainian border, the journalists wrote.

Squadrons based there have been accused by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International of attacks on civilians, including the March 16 bombing of a Mariupol theatre where hundreds of people are believed to have died in what Amnesty described as a “war crime”.

TotalEnergies — formerly Total — owns 49 percent of Terneftegaz, the company that extracts gas from the Termokarstovoye field, according to its 2021 annual report.

The other 51 percent is held by Russian company Novatek, in which the French firm also holds a 19.4 percent stake.

Le Monde wrote that natural gas condensates — a liquid hydrocarbon recovered when extracting the gas itself — are sent by pipeline for processing at a Novatek plant in Purovsky.

They are then sent by rail for further refining into jet fuel in the southern Siberian city of Omsk.

Since early 2022 shipments from there have reached airbases near the Ukrainian border, the newspaper reported, citing data from financial information firm Refinitiv — the first such deliveries since 2017.

Beginning days before the war started in late February and through July, 42,700 tonnes of fuel were sent to the airbases at Morozovsk and Malshevo, the data showed.

That was “enough to fill 3,400 Sukhoi Su-34 fuel tanks,” the investigative nonprofit Global Witness wrote on its website, referring to a particular model of Russian fighter-bomber.

– ‘No information’ –

While most global energy giants have quit operating in Russia since its invasion of Ukraine — often at great cost — TotalEnergies has said it will stop purchases of Russian oil by the end of 2022, but has proved reluctant to abandon its gas business there.

Chief executive Patrick Pouyanne said in March that gas fields exploited by the company’s joint ventures “are going to operate whether I leave or not” and remain vital for supplying energy to Europe.

Posting detailed responses it had earlier sent to Le Monde on its website, TotalEnergies said that the gas condensate from Termokarstovoye accounted for seven percent of the volume processed by Novatek at its Omsk refinery.

“We don’t know what would allow someone to say that the gas condensate produced by Terneftegaz is used to make jet fuel for use in Russian war planes,” it added.

For its part, “TotalEnergies has no information about sales made independently by Novatek on the Russian market, nor control over these sales,” the company said.

“As a minority shareholder in Novatek, TotalEnergies has no control over its operational activities” nor over those of Terneftegaz, it added.

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