The Ministry of Fuel and Energy is completing an inspection of the agreements and protocols signed with Russia on natural gas deliveries. The aim is to provide Ukraine with the most advantageous conditions. Reporting about this, the head of Minpalyvenerho, Yurii Boiko, specified: “By April 1 we will come to our Russian colleagues with a proposal that contains our view of the situation.” The Ukrainian fuel and energy minister also said that the agreement on conducting such an examination was reached earlier by the Subcommittee on Economic Questions of the Russo-Ukrainian interstate commission.
The minister also announced that the negotiations on the price of Russian gas for Ukraine will start this summer. “An optimistic scenario is raising the gas price according to our inflation rate this year,” Boiko predicts. Naturally, there is no talk of a pessimistic scenario. But it looks as if this will depend to a large extent on whether the country manages to finish this gas year without incurring large debts to suppliers. The debt accumulated by heat and energy companies, consumers, and other categories of gas consumers has increased by UAH 2.29 billion, but thanks to the re-crediting of the joint enterprise UkrGasEnerho the increase in the debt to the supplier RosUkrEnergo is being curbed, Boiko told journalists.
“That is why Naftohaz Ukrainy does not have any foreign debt and is not subject to sanctions from foreign economic agreements,” the minister admitted, adding: “Today the whole burden is borne by Naftohaz Ukrainy and RosUkrEnergo — UkrGaz-Enerho.”
Will the government manage to resolve the debt situation in the gas sphere? As Boiko says, in the non-payer structure the first spot is occupied by heat and energy companies with their 1.4 billion debts. He also explained that in many cases gas for heat and energy companies is in reality given not to the territorial community but to the renters of these companies. So the minister is certain that after the cold season ends, the government will offer a number of initiatives to develop a partnership with the regions.
In particular, it will have to deal with the painful topic of staffing policy, because, according to Boiko, the government is responsible for gas supply and payments, but it is the president who appoints the heads of regions.
Recent stories in the mass media, including The Day, report that people in the West have discovered the real owners of RosUkrEnergo and their connections with the criminal world. Russia’s Gazprom intends to adopt measures for increasing this company’s ridiculously small statutory fund.
How will Ukraine react to this? Responding to this question, Boiko said: “Concerning the co-founding share in RosUkrEnergo, we are above all interested in having a guaranteed gas supply of 55 billion cubic meters on the Ukrainian border at a price lower than our neighbors’ in order to have a guaranteed adaptation period for our economy...Until these questions are resolved in a timely fashion, with our national interests taken into account, we are not interested in the co- founders’ share and their corporate participation,” the minister added.
Although that sounds a bit dodgy, today this approach is meeting the country’s national interests to the greatest extent because a new scandal in this sphere means new, and highly inflated, gas prices for Ukraine. So is it worth starting one?
According to Ukrainian expert Andrii Yermolaiev, the director of the Sofia Social Research Center, the attempt to discredit RosUkrEnergo, Ukraine’s only natural gas supplier, is to the detriment of the country’s economic stability. The rejection of the existing scheme of natural gas supplies with the participation of RosUkrEnergo will lead to rising prices for energy carriers, which will have a negative impact on the value of shares in Ukraine’s mining complex and chemical industry. Such a scenario, Yermolaiev thinks, is convenient for the financial-industrial groups that are trying to discredit RosUkrEnergo.
It may not be worth whitewashing this company, but one cannot help admitting that after it began dominating Ukraine’s gas sector, there have not been any fuel stoppages. Ukraine should also take a better look at the activity of this gas duo — RosUkrEnergo and UkrGas-Enerho — in the country’s domestic market and cautiously ask it to curb its appetites in favor of the domestic gas trader, Naftohaz Ukrainy, and its subsidiary enterprises.
