Poland has failed in its attempts to stand in the way of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project, the CEO of Germany’s largest oil and natural gas company Wintershall, Mario Mehren, said in an interview quoted by Sputniknews.

“First, we and our western partners are working on ensuring financial support to Nord Stream 2. Second, the operator company is implementing the project on a step-by-step basis. It has already ordered the pipes and is ready to start working. All the Poles managed to do was to turn a European project into one with only a single Russian partner left to foot the bill,” Merhen told the German Handelsblatt newspaper on Thursday.

He added that during the work on Nord Stream 1, Warsaw feared that a gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea bypassing Poland could make the country vulnerable to “Russian blackmail.”

“Poland and Ukraine worry that their transit earnings could go down, but this should not concern us because we now have the most direct and economical way of pumping gas from Siberia to consumers in Northwestern Europe. Gas transport is not an investment into the budget of third party countries,” Mario Mehren emphasized.

Poland is the staunchest opponent of Nord Stream 2. Last year it warned it would block the venture because it could allegedly make Europe more dependent on Russian gas.

As a result, the five West European partners – Engie, OMV, Shell, Uniper and Wintershall – had to pull out of plans to take stakes in Nord Stream 2, thus forcing Gazprom to finance the project on its own.