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One year ago, Gazprom dropped South Stream after the European Commission announced that the project does not comply with the legislation of the Third Energy Package. The pipeline was supposed to cross the Black Sea avoiding Ukraine and transporting the natural gas through Bulgaria, Hungary, Austria towards Western Europe. Immediately after abandoning South Stream, the Russian giant promoted Turkish Stream, a pipeline also going below the Black Sea, but which connects Russia to Turkey directly. Russia has told Europe that starting in 2019, it needs to connect its infrastructure to the new pipeline because it wants to stop transporting natural gas through Ukraine.  Turkey did its job well and has negotiated very harshly with Russia the price of natural gas that should "flow" through Turkish Stream. Meanwhile, the conflict with Syria has begun, in which Turkey and Russia have diverging interests, and Gazprom has announced in the beginning of the month, that it is postponing the project, after signing a deal in September with five major European energy companies to build Nord Stream 2.  At the end of last week, Ali Riza Alaboyun, Turkish minister of energy, said, quoted by trend.az, that the implementation of Turkish Stream will be clarified soon, mentioning that the intergovernmental agreement would be reevaluated after the parliamentary elections in Turkey, scheduled to take place on November 1st.  Minister Alaboyun felt the need to stipulate that Turkey will support every action that "puts energy resources at work for peace ands security". Besides, for 28 years, Turkey has been one of the main markets for Russia to sell its natural gas on. The official further said: "Currently, 10 billion cubic meters of Russian gas is being imported by Russian private companies and 20 billion cubic meters by state owned company Botas. We are also importing natural gas from Azerbaidjan, Iran, Nigeria and Algeria". Turkish Stream is designed to have four transport avenues, each with 15.75 billion cubic meters each.  The American Energy Information Agency (EIA) showed, in a recent report, that the reason why Turkish Stream "froze" was that Turkey could not agree with Russia on the price of natural gas. Turkish Stream was supposed to be the connection for Eastring, which would bring the Russian gas to South-Eastern Europe, involving, among other countries Slovakia, Hungary and Romania (ed. note: the networks exists and a better interconnection is being built).

     The EIA noted that alternative suppliers for Europe aside from Azerbaijan would Iran and Iraq, but it mentioned that Iranian natural gas would be hard to bring in due to the lack of infrastructure.