Russian gas pipeline 'unstoppable': report

Swedish objections to a controversial pipeline to deliver natural gas from Russia to Germany along the Baltic Sea floor fell on deaf ears in Russia, according to US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.

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Russia's president at the time, Vladimir Putin, and other power brokers in Russia had no intention to listening to criticisms or protests coming from any direction when it came to the construction of the Nord Stream pipeline, the WikiLeaks documents show.

The pipeline was going to be built no matter what, according to confidential US embassy documents made available by the whistleblower website, the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper reports.

In a report from the US embassy in Moscow, the EU coordinator with Russia's foreign ministry, Dmitri Polyanski, said back in 2007 that the pipeline would be built regardless of noisy protests from Poland, Estonia, and Sweden.

"It can't be stopped. Not even by a big EU country like Poland," he said.

Sweden approved the Nord Stream project in November 2009. It is projected to supply 25 million European households with natural gas from Russia.

The most vociferous protests to the 1200 kilometre long Nord Stream pipeline had to do with the project's potential environmental impact on sensitive marine environments along the Baltc Sea floor.

By shutting off gas supplies through Ukraine in 2009, Russia was able to show how things might be without the Nord Stream supply line, other documents show.

Officially, however, the gas supplies were shut down due to theft taking place in Ukraine.

"The Kremlin obviously has a commercial goal in the dispute, among them the secure European support for Nord Stream," one analyst to the US ambassador in Moscow in 2009.