Amid ‘gas war’ talk, Russia reassures Europe on supply
Russia, which last month angered Western
powers by annexing Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula, has raised the price it charges
Kyiv for gas and said it owes Moscow $2.2 billion in unpaid bills.
That
has raised the specter of previous “gas wars”, when rows between the two former
Soviet states led to problems with onward supplies to western Europe. A repeat
of that scenario could hurt Russia as well as EU customers for its gas because
Moscow depends for its public revenues on selling gas in Europe.
“I want
to say again: We do not intend and do not plan to shut off the gas for Ukraine,”
Putin said in televised comments at a meeting of his advisory Security Council.
“We guarantee fulfillment of all our obligations to our European
consumers.”
The stand-off, precipitated by the overthrow of the
Moscow-backed Ukrainian president after he rejected closer ties to the European
Union, has brought Russia’s relations with the West to their most fraught since
the end of the Cold War in 1991.
In a sign of efforts to calm tempers,
aides to EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton confirmed a meeting next
Thursday involving Russia and Ukraine with Ashton and US officials.
After
Russian troops took over Crimea last month, officials with the NATO military
alliance said Moscow was massing forces on the border with mainly
Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, possibly as a prelude to seizing more parts of
the country.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov denied on Friday that
this was the Kremlin’s intention.
“We cannot have such a desire. It
contradicts the core interests of the Russian Federation. We want Ukraine to be
whole within its current borders, but whole with full respect for the regions,”
state-run RIA news agency quoted Lavrov as saying.
The Kremlin intervened
in Crimea after President Viktor Yanukovich was pushed out following weeks of
protests in the capital that turned bloody in mid-February. He was replaced by a
government that wants close ties with the West, but which Moscow says is
illegitimate and discriminates against Russian-speakers.
Russia’s chief
prosecutor said on Friday Moscow would not extradite Yanukovich, whom he called
Ukraine’s “legitimate president”, to face murder charges over protesters’
deaths.
REVERSE FLOWS
Though tension was still high around eastern
Ukraine, where pro-Russian activists this week seized public buildings in two
cities, the focus of the stand-off between Moscow and the West appeared to be
moving towards the vexed issue of gas.
Saying the EU would stand
together, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said member states would make a common
response to a letter Putin has sent to European gas importers raising the
prospect of cutting off supplies to Ukraine.
“There is good reason to
take this letter as an opportunity to deliver a joint European response,” she
said in Greece, which relies heavily on Moscow for gas. “We want to be good
customers and we want to be able to rely on Russian gas
supplies.”
Merkel’s finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble and Russian
counterpart Anton Siluanov met during international talks in Washington.
Siluanov said Germany was interested in a rapid resolution of the gas dispute –
and in Ukraine paying its debts.
A large proportion of Europe’s gas is
pumped from Russia via Ukraine’s territory.
Moscow has said it will cut
off supplies to Ukraine if it fails to pay what it owes. But Ukrainian Energy
Minister Yuri Prodan told parliament the EU would stand by with Kyiv to blunt
the impact of any cut-off or reduction in supplies to Ukraine.
“Ukraine
cannot pay such a political, uneconomic price,” Prodan said.
If Moscow
were to scale back deliveries of natural gas to Ukraine, the effects would be
unpredictable.
EU states have said they will reverse the flow of
pipelines that deliver Russian gas to them, pumping fuel back towards Ukraine.
The volumes involved are small, but they would mitigate a Russian
cut-off.
“We are negotiating with the European Union about reverse
deliveries into Ukraine,” Prodan said. “We will make gas purchases from reverse
flows urgently, on the conditions offered by European gas
companies.”
Officials in Kyiv said these would be Germany’s RWE and
France’s GDF Suez. Pipeline operators from Ukraine and its western neighbor
Slovakia will meet on Tuesday to resolve technical issues.
Brussels has
also said it would prevent Russia from shipping extra gas to EU customers via
pipelines that go around Ukraine to make up for deliveries disrupted by any
cut-off to Ukraine.
In effect, this raises the stakes for Russia; if it
wants to reduce supplies to Ukraine, it will also end up disrupting deliveries
to its EU customers as well. That would serve to speed up European steps to
diversify away from Russian gas.
European Energy Commissioner Guenther
Oettinger told Austria’s ORF radio he was working on a plan to help Ukraine pay
its gas bills to ensure its debts do not rise.
BESIEGED
PROTESTERS
In eastern Ukraine, government buildings in the cities of
Donetsk and Luhansk were still being occupied by pro-Russian protesters who want
their regions to split from Kyiv.
On Friday, a deadline set by the Kyiv
authorities for the protesters to end their occupation expired, but there was no
sign of action from the Ukrainian police to force them out.
Ukrainian
officials, calling it a repeat of the “Crimean scenario” say Russia may send in
troops to the eastern regions on the pretext of protecting those protesters from
persecution by Kyiv, an allegation Moscow denies.
Arseny Yatseniuk, prime
minister of an interim government that is holding a presidential election on May
25, visited Donetsk and renewed promises of constitutional change to give
regions devolved finance and other powers.
Kyiv is resisting calls,
backed by Moscow, for full-blown “federalism” that it fears would break up the
state altogether.
Yatseniuk also warned those occupying the buildings
that the authorities could force them out if they refused to
surrender.
In their latest telephone contact, Russian foreign minister
Lavrov asked US Secretary of State John Kerry to urge Yatseniuk not to use force
and to negotiate with the activists.
On a visit to Bulgaria, a NATO and
EU member that retains close cultural ties to Moscow, NATO Secretary General
Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Russia must withdraw its troops from the Ukrainian
border and enter into sincere dialogue with the West.
The Western defense
alliance presented satellite photographs on Thursday that it said showed Russian
deployments of 40,000 troops near the Ukrainian frontier along with tanks, other
armored vehicles, artillery and aircraft ready for action.
Russia said it
was normal military activity, not preparation for any attack. But in a mark of
concern, Ukraine said it was not demobilizing army conscripts who had finished
their service.