Croatia, Hungary and Lithuania discriminate against foreign gas pipeline operators, showed the findings by a panel of three adjudicators to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), sustaining a part of objections made by Russia against EU gas market rules, Reuters reported on Friday.

Moscow initiated this case in 2014, claiming that “the EU’s ‘Third Energy Package’ and the EU’s energy policy overall unfairly restricted and discriminated against Russia’s gas export monopoly Gazprom”.

The panel concluded that Croatia, Hungary, and Lithuania discriminated against Russia, having required assessments of security of energy supply for foreign pipeline operators. The countries did not require such assessments for domestic operators, Reuters reported.

EU adopted the reform package in 2009 in order to boost the European energy market integration and encourage competition.

Russia argued that the EU broke WTO rules by requiring the ‘unbundling’ of gas transmission assets and production and supply assets, which effectively stopped Gazprom – a long-time major supplier of gas to Europe – from owning the pipelines through which it sent gas to the European market, Reuters said.

Russia said the EU had unfairly discriminated in favour of liquefied natural gas and upstream pipeline operators by exempting them from the unbundling requirements. The panel of three WTO adjudicators ruled against Russia on those issues.

They did, however, accept Russia’s complaint regarding exempting German pipeline OPAL from the unbundling, which was granted on the condition that Gazprom’s supply did not exceed 50 percent of total gas supply in the pipeline.

The European Commission (EC) said in a statement the ruling was “an important positive outcome that secured the core elements of the Third Energy Package, a 2009 reform that sought to integrate the EU’s energy market while increasing competition.”

“The Commission will now analyse the ruling in detail, in particular as regards a limited number of issues on which the WTO-compatibility of EU energy policy has still not been recognized,” EC said.