Kyiv, April 27 (Interfax-Ukraine) – Ukraine is physically shipping natural gas from Europe under a bilateral contract, so there is no reason to talk about any non-transparent schemes of the reverse gas supplies, Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine Yuriy Boyko believes.
“No. We do not have any virtual re-export. We have the physical delivery of gas under a bilateral contract. Gazprom has no part in this contract,” he said in an interview with the Dzerkalo Tyzhnya newspaper.
“Should we be talking about the ‘virtual reverse’, or the so-called swap, then there would be a simple replacement of documents on the gas that went west, allowing us to keep it here. Then we should sign a tripartite act that the gas remains here, but from the storage facilities or from the west direction it goes to the consumers in Europe. But we actually have a physical reverse, which goes through the pipe. We have the purchased capacity, delivery schedules, and starting from November we have been physically receiving the gas,” Boyko said.
When asked, whether this was the gas supplied by Germany’s RWE via Poland, the deputy prime minister said: “We have a contract with RWE for the volume of up to 5 billion. Therefore we are getting only RWE’s gas across the board. We are implementing this two-way contract. Gazprom is not involved in this contract.”
On April 17, Gazprom spokesman Sergei Kuprianov told journalists that “physically reversing the direction of gas flow [to import gas] from Europe is impossible. There is no separate gas pipeline.” Therefore, these can only be some kind of ‘paper,’ opaque operations, whose legality needs to be investigated: if the ‘virtual reverse’ uses our transit gas, that is a direct violation for which there must be an accounting,” he said.
It was reported earlier that Ukraine began importing natural gas from Germany through Poland in November 2012 and deliveries of natural gas from Hungary began in April 2013. In addition, gas transportation talks are underway with Slovakia and Romania. In all Ukraine hopes to receive 7 billion cubic meters of gas from suppliers in Europe. Ukraine’s partner in the project is German RWE, with which Gazprom is engaged in a dispute over the terms of Russian gas exports.
Naftogaz Ukrainy has been reducing its purchases of Russian gas under contracts that contain take-or-pay provisions. Gazprom earlier presented Naftogaz with a $7-billion bill for taking up less gas than contracted in 2012.
