Brussels, 10/06/2014 (Agence Europe) - Trilateral negotiations between Russia, Ukraine and the EU on the payment of the Ukrainian gas debt to Gazprom and on the security of supplies to Ukraine of Russian gas had still not led to an agreement, as of Tuesday 10 June.
After a night of intensive talks in Brussels, the Russian and Ukrainian parties parted on Tuesday morning without reaching an agreement, but they agreed to resume their discussions on Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning, Energy Commissioner Gunther Oettinger, who is acting as mediator, announced. The deadline set by Russia for the Ukrainian debt to be paid expired on Tuesday.
On 2 June, the Russian and Ukrainian gas companies, Gazprom and Naftogaz respectively, agreed to study a plan to allow Ukraine to pay back its debt and secure its supplies of Russian gas until June 2015. “The aim is to agree on paying the arrears (of the Ukrainian debt), on a fair price for Russian gas for Ukraine and on the modernisation of the Ukrainian system of gas pipelines”, Commission President José Manuel Barroso summed up on 4 June.
Ukraine wants to change the conditions of the 2009 contract which obliges it to buy a set volume of gas at a price of $485 per 1000 m³. At the end of 2013, Russia dropped this price to $268.50, before raising it again following the ousting of the former Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych. Commissioner Oettinger is trying to get the Russian and Ukrainian parties to meet on a price somewhere in the middle. The average price paid to Gazprom by its European clients is around $370 per 1000 m³.
Consequently, Russia and Ukraine failed to agree on the bill to be settled by Naftogaz. With the payment of an initial tranche of $786 million at the end of May, the rest of the debt for 2013 and 2014 undisputed by Kiev stands at $1.454 billion. Gazprom has quoted a figure of $4.46 billion.
Following a meeting held in France on 6 June with the Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said that Gazprom and Naftogaz were “close to a final agreement”.
On Tuesday, Commissioner Oettinger acknowledged that “some questions [were] still open and differences of opinion remained to be overcome”, but added that the Russian and Ukrainian parties had agreed to continue talks. Shortly afterwards, his spokesperson said that the question of prices was one of the questions still open. For his part, the Ukrainian energy minister, Yuri Prodan, stated that the stumbling block of the talks continued to be a price mechanism put forward by Russia, proposing to link the price reductions to export taxes. The Russian energy minister, Alexander Novak, feels that he “put forward a highly constructive plan, which [he feels] all stakeholders can and should agree to”. (EH)