Moscow – A new trilateral meeting on gas will be held at the end of March, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak told reporters in Brussels.
The meeting will discuss issues concerning gas supplies to Ukraine in the summer.
“We also touched on the issue concerning supplies in the summer period, injection of gas into underground storage. We agreed to discuss this issue at the end of March. Consultations will yet be continued,” Novak said on TV channel Rossiya 24.
Russia’s ambassador to the European Union, Vladimir Chizhov told reporters that there is no deadline for the creation of a trilateral working group to discuss gas supplies to the Donetsk basin in eastern Ukraine.
“There is no fundamental agreement on its composition. The European Commission set about proposing the composition but realized the diametric differences in the assessment of this list with the Russian and Ukrainian sides,” Chizhov said.
Maros Sefcovic, the European Commission vice president in charge of Energy Union, who chaired the meeting, identified three main agreements reached as a result of the trilateral negotiations.
The parties confirmed intentions to fully ensure the fulfillment of the winter package agreed on at the previous meeting. Naftogaz Ukraine will pay in advance and order a sufficient amount of gas from Russia’s Gazprom to cover all domestic demand in Ukraine for March. Naftogaz continues to guarantee uninterrupted transit of gas to the EU. Gazprom will supply up to 114 million cubic meters of prepaid and ordered gas per day to the agreed delivery points. Meeting these obligations, the parties demonstrate their reliability, respectively, as an important supplier of natural gas to the EU and as a key transit country for Russian gas supplies to the EU.
Secondly, the parties acknowledged that the issue of gas supplies to certain areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions is very complicated in the legal, technical and political sense. Discussion of this issue will continue.
Thirdly, the parties expressed a willingness to continue trilateral negotiations in order to reach an agreement on how to proceed after the winter package as prescribed by the Minsk declaration of Feb. 12, 2015. The EC proposes that the parties present their proposals for possible agenda items for the next trilateral meeting.
Following the trilateral gas negotiations between Russia, Ukraine and the EU, Novak told reporters that Gazprom had already supplied about 100 mcm of gas to the Donetsk basin.
He said that an agreement was reached at the meeting that gas supplied by Gazprom to certain areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions will not be included in the calculation of prepayment for Gazprom’s gas deliveries to Naftogaz Ukraine, but these supplies are still taken into account under the current contract between the companies.
Novak said that at the talks Ukraine confirmed that it has the financial resources to make advance payments as needed. “But they’re not prepared to say the amounts right now, as this depends in large part on the temperature to the end of March,” the minister said.
Russia’s Energy Ministry estimates Ukraine’s gas needs in March at 1 bcm-1.2 bcm depending on the weather and the economy’s needs.
Novak said “the requests that Gazprom is currently filling from Donbastransgaz, they are being filled at the request of these individual areas of Luhansk and Donetsk regions.”
“And as for the possibility of supplies from Naftogaz Ukraine, they, above all, depend on the implementation of technical elements that we believe have not yet been resolved for supplies,” Novak said.
He said Gazprom sent Ukraine a request to confirm that prepayment will be made only if these amounts of gas will not be delivered to the Platovo and Prokhorovka gas metering stations.
“Accordingly, a correspondence is underway between Gazprom and Naftogaz. There is no such confirmation and we therefore agreed that we will set aside the issue of discussing supplies to the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics in particular and remove it from the scope of the winter package in order to determine the amounts that will be supplied under prepayment,” Novak said.
Naftogaz Ukraine said that at the trilateral talks it was confirmed that the Ukrainian state company will pay Gazprom only for natural gas delivered through the agreed receiving points.
The parties confirmed that only the amounts of gas supplied through gas receiving points agreed upon with Ukrtransgaz will be used for the purposes of settlement for the winter package, Naftogaz said in a press release.
Naftogaz submitted its evidence of violations of the winter package by the Russian side, the Ukrainian company said.
The EC delegation at the talks was headed by Sefcovic, Russia was represented by Novak and Ukraine was represented by Energy and Coal Minister Volodymyr Demchyshyn and Naftogaz CEO Andrei Kobolev.
