Moscow - Kyiv, February 27 (PolitNavigator, Mikhail Stamm) - Gazprom has given in to the demands of Kyiv and the EU: it is ready to share the issues of supplying Donbass and Ukraine. This means that the company actually agrees that Kyiv does not pay for gas supply to Donbass. Thus, the situation is developing according to the Transnistrian scenario, summarizes Kommersant.
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“We are ready at the moment to take the supply of our gas to Donbass out of the scope of discussion and are ready to deliver the volumes declared by Naftogaz to the entry points indicated by them,” Gazprom representative Sergei Kupriyanov told the Rossiya 24 TV channel. He emphasized that if Naftogaz does not make an advance payment in the coming days, supplies to Ukraine will stop.
Naftogaz refused to recognize Gazprom’s supplies to Donetsk and Lugansk as contractual and to make a new advance payment, because it could not control the volumes passing to Donbass and sign daily acceptance certificates.
Now Gazprom actually agrees that Naftogaz will not pay for supplies to the DPR and LPR.
Kommersant’s interlocutor in the industry says that Gazprom does not want to bring the situation to the point of stopping supplies to Ukraine - without Russian gas, Kyiv would have to cut off consumers or take gas from the transit pipe. “They took the following position: stop supplies to Donbass, or we will not make an advance payment, but we need to find some way out,” he explains.
Russia does not want to expand the conflict with Ukraine against the backdrop of yesterday’s announcement by Kyiv about the beginning of the withdrawal of heavy weapons from the contact line, and violate agreements with the Europeans, believes the head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy Fyodor Lukyanov.
In his opinion, a frozen conflict scenario has been chosen with the DPR and LPR and the same scheme is being reproduced as with Transnistria: Russian gas is supplied there essentially free of charge, and the debt is legally assigned to Moldova.