Business | Oil & Gas
Ukraine to reduce transit gas supplies to western Europe
Ukraine's oil and gas company has informed Russia's Gazprom that it would respond to Russian supply cuts by reducing the amount of transit gas supplies moving on to other parts of Europe starting yesterday, Gaz-prom said.
- AP
- Published: 00:53 March 6, 2008
Moscow: Ukraine's oil and gas company has informed Russia's Gazprom that it would respond to Russian supply cuts by reducing the amount of transit gas supplies moving on to other parts of Europe starting yesterday, Gaz-prom said.
A spokesman for Russia's natural gas monopoly, Sergei Kupriyanov, said Ukraine's Naftogaz company sent a telegram to Gazprom saying it intends to cut transit gas supplies to western Europe by 60 million cubic metres a day effective yesterday.
"It means that Gazprom will supply this amount of gas to Ukraine, but it won't reach European consumers," Kupriyanov said.
He said the Naftogaz move will result in supplies of Russian gas to other parts of Europe dropping from some 386 million cubic metres to about 325 million a day.
Naftogaz spokesman Val-entyn Zemlyansky would not comment directly on Gazprom's statement. However, he said that Ukraine had been supplying more than a regular amount of transit gas to Europe recently and would now reduce the amount to what he called a normal level.
He insisted that Ukraine would not violate any of its transit obligations.
Conflicting signals
Gazprom had said that supplies to Europe would not be affected by the dispute, but Ukrainian officials have given conflicting signals.
A Naftogaz spokesman said on Tuesday that the company could begin diverting transit gas if a second Russian cut were imposed, but another company spokesman said later that such a move was not in the immediate offing because of warm weather and substantial reserves.
Gazprom portrays the cutoffs as a straightforward commercial dispute, but it has considerable political resonance.
Critics accuse the Kremlin of using Gazprom as an instrument of pressure.
Only about one-quarter of the gas imported by Ukraine is of Russian origin; the rest comes from Turkmenistan and Kazakh-stan in pipelines controlled by Gazprom.
Naftogaz said that by going ahead with the threatened reduction, Gazprom would be cutting the Central Asian gas as well as Russian-origin gas - a move that it said "grossly violates technical agreements between the two companies."
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