Kyiv, September 30 (PolitNavigator, Vladimir Raichenko) - The Ukrainian side in the gas dispute with Russia has gone so far as to actually offer to buy Russian gas at an unimaginably high price for Europe - $620 per 1000 cubic meters. The director of the Institute of Energy Research, Dmitry Marunich, drew attention to this paradoxical nuance of the gas dispute.
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“If we take $3,1 billion,” he says, “which, as a consolidated opinion, they agreed to define as debt, and divide it by 11 billion cubic meters of gas that Ukraine has collectively taken but not paid for since the fourth quarter of 2013, it turns out 269 dollars. But Mr. Prodan (Minister of Energy - ed.) says that 3,1 billion should be an advance payment for five billion cubic meters of gas. And if we divide one by the other, the price will be 620 dollars. It cannot look like this, since no country in the EU buys gas at this price.”
The director of the Institute for Energy Research says he doesn't understand why the talks in Berlin ended inconclusively because, in his opinion, "there was an opportunity to agree on terms that would somehow allow each of the participants to declare victory."
“It seems to me that a subjective factor played a role here,” Marunich believes. – For four months we were told about Moscow’s gas weapons and so on, and now we need to agree to the conditions that were discussed in June. It will probably take some time for this to happen.”
In addition, it was said that delaying negotiations jeopardizes the supply of gas not only to Ukrainian, but also to European consumers. “I don’t want to stigmatize anyone, but in many ways it is our negotiators who are trying to delay these negotiations,” Marunich concluded. “And I personally don’t see any rational grounds for delaying the negotiations yet.”