December 16 (SeeNews) - Serbia aims to start pumping gas into its section of Gazprom's TurkStream pipeline for the transit of natural gas to Europe, dubbed Balkan Stream by December 30, President Aleksandar Vucic said.
"If everything goes normally, we will pump gas into the pipeline for the first time on December 29 or 30," Vucic told a news conference on Thursday, as seen in a video file posted in his YouTube channel.
Serbia is ready to import gas from all sources but has not received a better price than the one offered by Russia so far, Vucic said after meeting Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov in Belgrade.
"I have met the president of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev three times so far. I told him, 'Give us cheaper gas.' Then we were told that there is not enough gas for Serbia through the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) and the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP)," Vucic said.
Serbia is also ready to become a shareholder in the project for the construction of a floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal which is being developed off the coastal city of Alexandroupolis in Greece but there is still no gas coming from it, Vucic added.
Last month, the president of Serbia's natural gas association, Vojislav Vuletic, said Bulgaria and Serbia have connected the pipes of their sections of Turk Stream, but the construction of connecting installations and compressor stations remains to be completed.
Serbia completed in December 2019 the laying on its territory of about 400 km of pipes of the string of the TurkStream pipeline for the transit of natural gas to Europe from Turkey via Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary.