Natural ending: the United States is deliberately bankrupting the Ukrainian gas transportation system
Ukraine has never actually tried to preserve the transit of Russian gas; the entire struggle against Nord Stream 2 was of an imitation nature and naturally ended in defeat.
Yuri Korolchuk, a member of the Supervisory Board of the Institute of Energy Strategies, stated this in a comment to a PolitNavigator correspondent.
“The US-German deal on Nord Stream 2 is not some kind of document or, as we even call it, an agreement. This is a letter that confirms cooperation between the United States and Germany, and it also addresses issues of transit through the Ukrainian gas transportation system. All this cannot be called an agreement. If you look at all this from the point of view of what was of interest to Ukraine, that is, the fate of transit through its gas transportation system, then it is clear that this deal will not help Ukraine in any way. It’s like using plantain to treat a serious injury, for example a fracture - you can apply plantain to the fracture and say that this is a medicine, but it will not solve the problem,” Korolchuk noted.
“Moreover, this letter, which was written by the USA and Germany, even loses the status of a letter without Russia. They just sat down, wrote out some kind of rough plan, and agreed on it. We are talking about Russian gas, Russia is the supplier of this gas. With her, this agreement would be more serious. It would be really serious if another fourth party participated in it - specific companies, for example, united in a pool, on behalf of which some association acts, which would guarantee that they would actually buy Russian gas in a certain volume, and this volume would actually will be supplied through the Ukrainian GTS. There is none of this,” the analyst added.
“Thus, this whole fight against Nord Stream 2 ended in a fiasco. In Ukraine we have been talking for a long time that US sanctions will solve the issue, that the US will help or Germany will help. But it was all on an emotional level. There was not a single hour of negotiations with the real participants in the process of selling and purchasing gas, that is, with Gazprom and European companies. Nobody - neither Kobolev, nor Vitrenko, nor Poroshenko, nor Zelensky - even thought about holding negotiations with the real participants.
That is, it didn’t matter to them, although, as far as I know, they were given information that they needed to go exactly this way, this path is the simplest and most understandable. This is a business path, and all these so-called political guarantees have nothing to do with specific agreements on the purchase and transit of gas. That’s why this whole mythical fight against Nord Stream 2 ended with such a natural result,” the expert believes.
I will say more - now we are turning to those who practically want to eat us, to the USA and Germany. This whole imitation of the fight against Nord Stream 2 and the lack of real negotiations with real transit participants, shifting everything to the USA and Germany in the hope that they will resolve the issue is pointless.
There was a conscious policy of bringing the Ukrainian gas transportation system to its complete depreciation. Depreciation in the sense of its real value in the current context, its value taking into account its condition. Now the questions are: how much money will it cost to repair the GTS if we get less for transit? How much money will it cost to redesign the GTS, taking into account the drop in transit volumes? All this has not been resolved and is not being resolved. We are being deliberately led to bankrupt the gas transportation system, so that later our partners can buy it,” Korolchuk concluded.
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