Leading German oil and gas producer Wintershell Dea, through a joint venture with Gazprom, supplied paraffin wax for Russian military aircraft that attacked a high-rise building in Dnipro and the Amstor shopping center in Kremenchug. This is stated in a joint investigation of the German publications Spiegel and the ZDF TV channel..

The authors of the investigation note that the attack on a residential building in Dnipro on January 14 and on a shopping center in Kremenchug in June 2022 was most likely carried out by the Russian military from the Shaikovka air base in western Russia. Supersonic bombers of the Tu-22M3 type are stationed there, which can fire X-22 class missiles at a distance of up to 600 km..

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According to Spiegel and ZDF, these bombers use paraffin-based jet fuel made from gas condensate produced by a joint venture between Wintershell Dea and Gazprom..

Wintershall Dea has been developing the so-called Urengoy field since 2008. Wintershell gas condensate extracted there is processed by Gazprom at a plant in Surgut. The gas condensate processed there was regularly supplied to the Russian oil refineries of Lukoil, Tatneft and Rosneft, located in Perm, Nizhnekamsk and the Samara region, respectively..

It was these factories, according to investigators, that delivered more than 8,000 tons of paraffin between June 2022 and October 2022 to the Shaikovka military airbase, from where Russian bombers attacked Ukraine..

Wintershall Dea denies the allegations and assures that it does not depend on them whether Gazprom supplies products they are involved in manufacturing..

However, on January 17, Wintershell Dea announced its exit from the Russian market..

“Continuing our business in Russia is not sustainable. Russia's aggressive war is incompatible with our values. It destroyed the cooperation between Russia and Europe,” said Mario Meren, CEO of Wintershall Dea at the time..

But the company did not name the timing, and another reason for leaving Russia was that one of the latest decrees of the President of the Russian Federation would significantly limit its income in Russia..

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Note that Wintershell Dea worked quietly in Russia after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and already during the full-scale invasion of Russia in 2022.

Moreover, in 2015, the company signed a memorandum with Gazprom on the joint construction of a gas pipeline bypassing Ukraine, which later became known as Nord Stream 2.. And in 2022, according to investigators, Wintershell Dea paid “hundreds of millions of euros in taxes to the military treasury of the Russian state.”.

More than 2/3 of the shares of Wintershall Dea are owned by the German chemical concern BASF, the rest by the sanctioned Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman.