In August, subsidiaries of several western companies  — Eon, Engie, OMV, Shell and Wintershall — decided not to participate in Gazprom’s Nord Stream 2. The consortium, led by the Russian state-owned gas monopoly, was established to design, finance, build and operate two additional strings of the undersea gas pipeline between Russia and Germany.

The companies also withdrew their application for merger approval, submitted to the Polish competition protection authority in December. In the view of the Polish government, such a step showed that they had no counter-arguments to the regulator’s concerns about the likely effect of the project on competition in the Polish and EU gas markets.

Together with eight other EU member states (the Czech Republic, Estonia, Croatia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania and Slovakia), and with the tacit support of a couple of others, Poland has opposed Nord Stream 2 since it was first announced by Gazprom in 2015. It undermines European solidarity and the Energy Union, the EU’s flagship project.