Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic stated that the new gas pipeline, which will connect Serbia and Bulgaria, will allow receiving gas from Azerbaijan, TASS reported.

According to Vucic, Serbia will become a gas transit country for other Western Balkan countries thanks to the inter-system gas pipeline between Serbia and Bulgaria.

"As you know, we built our central gas pipeline 402 km long a year and a half ago, but we need additional volumes of gas, so the interconnector with Bulgaria is important to get gas from other sources...

Unlike much of Europe, Serbia is reindustrializing, not deindustrializing, so we will need more gas. This pipeline can bring 1.8 billion cubic meters of gas a year to Serbia, and it is bilateral... Thus, through our part of the gas pipeline, we will be able to supply other countries in the Western Balkans, we will be a transit country for them, just as Bulgaria is for us," Vucic said.

The Serbian President is currently in Bulgaria on an official visit, and he visited the construction site in Kostinbroda, not far from the capital Sofia, where on Wednesday the construction of the gas pipeline between Serbia and Bulgaria began.

The ceremony of launching the construction of the gas pipeline between Bulgaria and Serbia took place today. During the ceremony Ana Brnabic, Prime Minister of Serbia, has said that it will enable the country "to accept LNG from Greece, gas from Azerbaijan and any other sources".

The construction of the gas pipeline between Bulgaria and Serbia is expected to be completed by October 2023. The total cost of the project is 85.5 million euros, of which 25 million euros is a loan from the European Investment Bank, 49.6 million euros is non-refundable support from EU funds, 10.3 million euros is allocated from the Serbian budget and 600,000 euros is provided by Serbian Srbijagas. The capacity of the interconnector will be 1.8 billion cubic meters of gas per year.