There is speculation, no negotiations

Ukrainian political forces are diligently developing the gas issue

In Ukraine, the topic of gas supply for next year is one of the central issues in inter-party discussions. But at the same time, everyone understands that until the formation of a new government there is no certainty on this issue and cannot be. After all, gas suppliers - the Swiss trader RosUkrEnergo (the exclusive seller of imported fuel) and Gazprom (owns 50% of RUE shares and supplies the trader with Central Asian gas) - now have no one to negotiate with. Moreover, few are ready to predict how Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan will behave in the fall, from which Gazprom purchases about 55 billion cubic meters of gas per year for subsequent resale to RUE.

Another surge in gas unrest was provoked by the head of Naftogaz of Ukraine Yevgeny Bakulin, an ally of the head of the Ministry of Fuel and Energy Yuriy Boyko, who previously headed the Republican Party (joined the coalition of the Party of Regions of Viktor Yanukovych). Yesterday he said that he was negotiating with the Russian side about access to gas production in the Russian Federation in exchange for certain Ukrainian assets. The hint was understood: he meant the “sacred cow” of Ukraine - the gas transportation system.

Yesterday, the country's President Viktor Yushchenko said that negotiations on Russia's access to the Ukrainian gas transportation system are devoid of any legal basis and are proceeding without his consent, Reuters reports. “I would recommend gas workers to engage in gas and move away from politics. I did not give a mandate for this format of negotiations. What this gentleman is saying has no legal basis,” Mr. Yushchenko told reporters in the Zhytomyr region. Last year, amendments to the legislation were adopted that prohibit even thinking about transferring gas pipelines into the wrong hands, so the president’s words can be considered election propaganda.

Foreign Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk of the pro-presidential Our Ukraine, meanwhile, accused his government colleagues of disrupting negotiations with Russia on gas supplies. “As a minister, I sent relevant information to the President of Ukraine and the Prime Minister about the actual breakdown of the negotiation process,” he said in an interview with Radio Liberty. “After all, according to the interstate agreement, we should already have a protocol on gas supplies for 2008 ready and signed, which was not done, because there are neither directives nor the composition of the government delegation.”

Mr. Yatsenyuk apparently “forgot” that formally Russia in general and Gazprom in particular no longer have obligations to supply gas to Ukraine. And according to the agreement between Gazprom, Naftogaz of Ukraine and RosUkrEnergo dated January 4, 2006, which, as is known, put an end to the gas war, a Swiss trader became the exclusive supplier of imported fuel to the Ukrainian market. Accordingly, no intergovernmental protocols have been signed for two years, but an annual contract is concluded between RosUkrEnergo and the specially created joint venture Ukrgazenergo (owned by RUE and Naftogaz), which sells gas on the domestic market.

Deputy Prime Minister for the Fuel and Energy Complex Andrei Klyuev nevertheless claims that the negotiation process is underway, but so far there are no results. “At the moment we are conducting a fairly serious dialogue, and it is still very early to talk about increasing or decreasing gas prices by 10 or 3%,” he told Ukrayinska Pravda. “I think that by mid-September we will already know approximately at what price we will buy gas next year.”

In the near future, we should expect that opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko will join the gas discussion in Ukraine, who will most likely once again demand to get rid of RosUkrEnergo in the supply chain of Central Asian raw materials.

Alexey GRIVACHS