Ukrainian First Deputy Prime Minister Serhiy Arbuzov has said he sees no direct link between Ukraine's talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and its talks with Russia regarding the price of natural gas.
“There is no direct link between the work with the IMF in our country and the work [with Russia] in terms of the gas price,” he said at a press conference in Kyiv on Tuesday, March 19.
Arbuzov also said that Ukraine was in talks on a new program with the IMF.
“Today, we are talking about $15 billion. It is no different from previous ones. There’s not much difference between them for me. We are holding negotiations in the same way as we started negotiations under the last program,” he said.
The IMF mission last worked in Ukraine in the first half of February 2013 and also discussed the possibility of disbursing a new stand-by loan to the country. According to Arbuzov, Kyiv expects to receive SDR 10 billion from the fund, which will help it facilitate payments on previous loans from the IMF, the size of which is about $6 billion this year alone.
The previous Ukraine-IMF SBA, also worth SDR 10 billion, was formally terminated in December 2012. It was opened late in July 2010, but the country succeeded in getting two tranches worth a total of SDR 2.25 billion ($3.4 billion). The program was frozen at the stage of the second review in the spring of 2011. For a year and a half, Ukraine had been unsuccessfully trying to persuade the IMF to drop its objections to the government’s subsidizing natural gas tariffs for households until the completion of its gas talks with Russia, but failed.
