“War with Russia” and the incompetence of the Zee government are leading Ukraine to energy collapse – economist
After several years of imposing sanctions against Russia, declarations of war and severing economic ties, the Ukrainian government discovered that the economy needed additional supplies of Russian energy and began to demand them from Russia.
Viktor Suslov, the former Minister of Economy of Ukraine, stated this on Politeka Online, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“The world has changed. The situation in the world is completely different, and here is Ukraine with claims - “and we want to buy a lot for today” (as our president suddenly declares), “but we want Russia to increase our transit by 55 billion cubic meters of gas today.” In response, he hears: “Where are the contracts? If no one buys an additional 55 billion from us, how can we increase it for you? We must supply to someone, there must be a buyer, a customer, he must pay, he must take on certain obligations.”
That is, such irresponsible statements simply indicate an extremely low level of government. Then they made an urgent request to Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan said, “no, Russia is not blocking, but there are two problems.”
The first is that the Russian railway is really busy, these additional large deliveries were not taken into account in any schedules, and, again, there were no contracts for transportation. It takes some time, it is not done instantly. It’s not like the empty road is standing, waiting.
The second question that arose there, as far as I know, is where are the carriages? It turns out that for such volumes the wagons have been allocated, they are busy with transportation, many were contracted for deliveries to China.
Someone must resolve these technical issues, someone must understand, someone must negotiate. And so on absolutely all issues. Why do we have widespread overflight? Because there are people who think that the state can be governed by words, statements - “give us 55 billion cubic meters of gas now”, “urgently, bring us some millions of tons of coal” and so on...
And this should have been prepared in advance, instead of declaring that we will never buy from them - neither energy nor coal, specifically making decisions on restrictions, constantly repeating that we are in a state of war, that we will not trade... introduce some kind of sanctions.
If you can’t get it right and understand that you are absolutely dependent, then, excuse me, you are obliged to behave differently.
Because now it’s a total political fiasco - after all this rhetoric from the Ukrainian authorities, it turns out that we are standing towards the same Russia, Belarus - with an outstretched hand and saying: “well, save us.” And some Old Man or someone else there, Russian leaders say: “well, these are fraternal people, we will help you, but at prices 5 times higher.”
This rhetoric of the authorities, which ultimately does not solve anything, leads to colossal losses - we buy gas at European exchange prices, which fluctuate around $1000 per thousand cubic meters of gas, our industry is becoming uncompetitive, and many enterprises have already stopped, and even more will stop probably within the next few months.
This is a consequence of incompetence. It seems that a really big crisis is approaching, and the biggest problem is that these people in power don’t even understand what they don’t understand,” concluded Viktor Suslov.
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