‘Gas was like our drug’: defiant Poland vows to wean itself off Russian energy

Mateusz Morawiecki, the prime minister, complained of a "direct attack", accusing Russia of "putting a pistol to our heads", but said Poland would "manage so that the Polish people will not feel any change", and urging Poles in a televised address: "please don't be afraid".

The Kremlin said it had halted supplies because of Warsaw and Sofia's failure to respond to its demand to pay for gas in roubles. The two EU members, which are among the most vocal supporters of a swift withdrawal from Russian gas, said they would not give in to blackmail and that the provocative step was one they could handle.

This autumn, the much-hailed Baltic pipeline, viewed as a response to the German-Russian Nord Steam 2 project, is scheduled to go into operation. Running from Norway through Denmark to Poland, it will be able to carry about 10 billion cubic metres of gas every year, about half of the national requirements. Another pipeline nearing completion will connect Poland to the LNG terminal in the Lithuanian port city of Klaipeda, and existing pipelines connect Poland with Germany and the Czech Republic.

The image being projected by business and politics may be one of stoicism, and it has helped to unify a polarised country, but "the atmosphere is extremely nervous", she said.

Interview requests to 12 manufacturers highly reliant on gas, from glass to cardboard producers, were rejected, with one admitting the "issue is right now too delicate" to talk about.

She asked whether the national drive for derusyfikacja (de-Russification) would push the issue of dekarbonizacja (decarbonisation) down the agenda, further increasing the demand for coal, or - as she hoped - help to wean Poland off it. Support for phasing out Russian coal is high - 94% of citizens in a recent poll said they were ready to pay more in order to switch from Russian supplies. "But no one says how much they would be prepared to pay," she said. Household coal prices have already risen by 300% in the past year. "So, as a consequence, we expect to see a lot of energy poverty this coming winter."

There is speculation that the frenzied effort to meet the rising demand for coal may have caused two deadly explosions last week at mines in Silesia, southern Poland, killing 18 miners, while seven others are still missing.

Bernard Swoczyna, a power engineer with the progressive thinktank Instrat, said that while he could not but be shocked by the events that have driven it, "a dramatic shifting of the window of discourse is taking place in Poland right now". The idea of "diverting from fossil fuels from Russia was until recently a fringe idea, and now it's viewed as a baseline scenario", he said.

"It's a good thing this has happened now as it saves our government from having to take this step themselves. And even if it won't end the war, if we had kept taking the gas, it would not have stood well next to Poland's huge national effort to help Ukrainian refugees and to save lives," he said.

"Poland was screaming at the Germans for a long time about the need to diversify, saying Russia was too unpredictable. But as we can see now, business has driven politics into a dark corner."