In less than two weeks’ time Prime Minister Yuriy Yekhanurov will begin his visit to Turkmenistan. He is scheduled to arrive in Ashgabat on Oct. 26, where he will try to breathe new life into the barely warm negotiations on the supply of Turkmen gas to Ukraine. President Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan has refused to sign a 30-year contract and wants Ukraine to pay for the gas it has already received this year. He claims that Ukraine is not meeting its commitments to payments and investment projects. True, the Turkmen president has accepted a compromise: he has agreed that debts will be paid not with commodity supplies, as stipulated earlier, but in hard currency — $44 per 1,000 cubic meters of gas. The Ukrainian side gave its agreement last Friday. The Ukrainian delegation has never seen Niyazov take such a firm stand. Announcing that further talks have been postponed, he declared that they might be resumed with Russia’s participation. This means that any diversification of gas deliveries to this country will be out of the question, and our northern neighbor will get a chance to impose monopoly prices on Ukraine. Let’s not forget that a few years ago Russia and Turkmenistan signed a long-term gas supply contract allowing for the purchase of nearly all of Turkmenistan’s resources.
Yekhanurov is the one slated to unravel this gas problem, as the previous Ukrainian delegation led by fuel and energy minister Ivan Plachkov proved inadequate. Last Friday the Ukrainian prime minister, who is known as an experienced negotiator, gave Turkmenistan some promises from Kyiv. “We are trustworthy people and will meet our contractual obligations; we will in no way let our partners down,” the prime minister said. (Yushchenko’s letter to Niyazov, which was delivered by the Ukrainian delegation, also included a promise to meet “the commitments for the gas supplied by Ashgabat” and to honor it “through his personal supervision”). Yekhanurov also raised certain domestic policy issues in the context of the coming elections. Although he did not say what price Ukraine will now have to pay for Turkmenistan’s gas, he explained that if it changes, “people will not feel it.” The prime minister also unveiled plans to reduce industrial consumption of gas by 2.5 times and pursue “a tough government policy as far as the use of gas is concerned.”
Gas is becoming a pre-election issue for Ukrainian politicians. Some even hope it will be their ticket into the next parliament. After the Forward, Ukraine! Faction found out about the difficulties in Ashgabat, it immediately proposed a moratorium on the selling price of gas delivered to consumers and public utilities. It is a good thing that it suggested imposing this moratorium not just until the elections but for all of next year. The only question is: what’s next?
Experience has shown that unwarranted political interference in business matters usually leads to grave consequences. It is politics that has been helping Ukraine in recent years to obtain relatively cheap Russian and Turkmen gas, but at the same time the system of energy conservation did not work, and even the committee in charge was disbanded (incidentally, by the new leadership). As a result, as soon as there are any changes in politics, this country sinks permanently into a pre-shock condition over gas.
During last summer’s negotiations, the Turkmen side stated that it may be possible to sign a long-term agreement this fall. In a letter to his Turkmen counterpart the Ukrainian leader said that during Niyazov’s visit to Kyiv this month “we will be able to find common approaches and make mutually acceptable decisions concerning a whole range of bilateral issues.” No one even mentioned Moscow’s involvement in the Ukrainian-Turkmen gas talks. It looks as though our northern neighbor had a good time in Ashgabat. To make this assumption, there is no need to rely on private detectives’ reports. It is enough to recall all the maneuvering that Russia has done in the gas sector ever since Viktor Yushchenko came to power in Ukraine.
There was much talk of the gas stolen from Ukrainian underground reserves. But the discussions ended with the deputy manager of Russia’s Gazprom signing a statement of trust. Then the Russians insisted that we “overhaul” the payment mechanism for the transit of Russian gas through Ukrainian pipelines to Europe, although the interstate protocol declaring that the current system is valid until 2013 has not been repealed. And what about the never-ending reports in the Russian media about new pipelines that will supply gas to Europe by sea, thus bypassing Ukraine? And nobody even asked what this would cost the Russian flagging economy. As the Russian ambassador to Ukraine Viktor Chernomyrdin likes to say, it will cost a pretty penny. This is borne out by the experience of the Blue Flow gas pipeline, which is serviceable but loaded to just a quarter of its capacity. Also very much to the point were the revelations (leaked through the closed doors of the State Duma) of Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, who promised to apply to insufficiently loyal neighbors the main diplomatic resource of his country — gas, oil, and electricity. So it is quite logical to assume that to a large degree Ukraine’s Ashgabat problems have been caused by the fact that certain forces evaluate our policies through the prism of loyalty to Russia and then exert pressure on us.
At the same time, it would be unjust not to mention that our negotiators’ position in the Turkmen capital was not very strong. Even though political pressure was being brought to bear on Ukraine and hence the participants of the talks, our government failed to offer them political support and now seems to be ready to unleash a domestic witch-hunt. According to reports leaked to the pro-Russian media, the Main Auditing Department is going to audit Naftohaz Ukrainy. When questioned by The Day, officials from this department categorically denied these reports. Meanwhile, a stable financial situation is a reliable background for any kind of talks. And what did the Tymoshenko cabinet do with Naftohaz? The company was urged to step up budgetary allocations and it had to comply. But the cabinet refused to revise domestic prices for gas, and the company had to sell it at a loss, according to gas distributors. The ban on exporting gas from Ukraine also inflicted irreparable damage to our gas facilities, which in turn badly affected payments for Turkmen gas already delivered.
What are the forecasts? It is unlikely that the ongoing witch-hunt (e.g., the dismissal of Anatoliy Rudnyk from the board of directors of Naftohaz Ukrainy) will improve things. It would be totally wrong to change horses in midstream at such a critical moment; better to involve political resources in the negotiating process. By all accounts, the president should become involved in the negotiations.
