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On February 23, the Russian Ministry of Energy officially stated that it had shut off a portion of a pipeline due to an accident, an emergency measure that stopped gas flows to neighboring Kazakhstan, just as temperatures dropped again below freezing in the Central Asian country.
The explosion at the Orenburg-Novopskov pipeline section – which runs along the Soviet-era Soyuz pipeline – led to a drastic reduction of gas supplies from Russia to the West Kazakhstan region. While gas-rich, the West Kazakhstan region’s pipeline system is structured in a way that renders it dependent on Russian gas supplies.
Russia and Kazakhstan share the longest continuous border in the world, spanning 7,600 kilometers. Electricity and pipeline networks, as well as railroads and highways, intersect the border several times, because this infrastructure was mostly built during Soviet times, when the border was a mere administrative demarcation.