Putin orders renewal of crude oil deliveries to Czech Republic

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has ordered the government to renew crude oil deliveries to the Czech Republic, the Interfax news agency reported on Monday. Russia had unexpectedly cut deliveries via the Druzhba pipeline earlier this month by nearly 50 percent. Moscow said the cut in supplies was caused by technical problems and denied that it was linked to the signing of a Czech-US treaty on the positioning of a US missile defense radar on Czech soil. The main Czech refiner Unipetrol started tapping state oil reserves and increased deliveries through the Ingolstadt pipeline to make up for the outage.