The move, first reported by Handelsblatt, comes after Uniper last week launched an arbitration process in the hope of securing billions of euros in compensation from Gazprom over undelivered gas volumes.

RWE's exposure to Russian gas supplies has been fairly low in comparison, covering 15 terawatt hours (TWh) by 2023, which has been reduced to 4 TWh since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine.

Uniper, which incurred losses of around 11.6 billion euros ($12.3 billion) to date by replacing Russian supplies that have stopped since end-August, has an exposure of 200 TWh.

($1 = 0.9466 euros)

(Writing by Miranda Murray and Christoph Steitz; Editing by Rachel More)