With billions of dollars of natural gas at stake, Ukraine and Russia seem to once again be putting brotherly Slavic love aside in favour of poker-faced brinkmanship.
It’s been two weeks since the FT revealed that Russia’s Gazprom had slapped Ukraine with a whopping $7billion bill for natural gas not supplied in 2012. Strangely, Gazprom has not said much on the matter since then. It could yet challenge Ukraine through arbitration, yet Ukrainian officials appear unphased by the prospect.
They claim to have a strong legal case and more leverage than ever in the past, and are already taking about further cutting Russian gas imports – buying, instead, large volumes of less expensive gas from other European suppliers.
