Gas debt: Ukraine to seek EU, US help
Ukraine’s Prime Minister said on Thursday he would ask the United States and Germany for help paying Kyiv’s gas debt to Moscow so that Russia could resume supplies.
Arseniy Yatsenyuk told a cabinet meeting he planned to speak to US Vice President Joe Biden and German chancellor Angela Merkel later on Thursday as EU-mediated negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian energy officials continue in Brussels.
Mr Yatsenyuk said he would discuss the provision of “additional financial instruments for Ukraine that would help stabilise the budget and pay our energy bills.”
Several acrimonious rounds of gas talks have failed to resolve a dispute stemming from Kyiv’s refusal to pay a higher rate imposed by Moscow in the wake of the February ouster of Ukraine’s Kremlin-backed President. Russia’s state energy holding company Gazprom cut Ukraine’s gas deliveries in June the third such interruption in less than 10 years.
The halt did not immediately impact European clients that receive about half their Russian shipments through Ukraine. But EU nations fear that Ukraine its fuel supplies running critically low heading into the winter may be forced out of desperation to tap into the gas it transports westwards. The two sides have reached a tentative price deal that would see Russia lower its demands by about 20 per cent to $385 (302 euros) per 1,000 cubic metres for the coming six months. But a final agreement has stalled over Moscow’s insist that Brussels and Kyiv agree on how Ukraine will pay off a debt of $3.1 billion (2.5 billion euros) by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, a Ukrainian military spokesman said on Thursday that at least seven Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in the past 24 hours in the east of the country despite a ceasefire with separatists,
“They were killed in different places by shelling and one was killed in an ambush,” spokesman Andriy Lysenko said. Eleven others had been wounded in various incidents. The deaths further strained a tenuous cease-fire.