Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko believes Ukraine's gas agreement with Russia can be changed at "any moment."
The president said this in an interview with Bloomberg news agency, the presidential secretariat’s information service reported.
“The agreement can be revised at any moment,” he said, without elaborating.
The president said he supported the state-run gas company Naftogaz Ukrainy’s plans to repay or swap $500 million of Eurobonds.
Yuschenko said that Naftogaz’s current problems are the result of
the government’s policy and gas agreements signed by Ukraine and Russia
in January 2009.
“The gas agreement breaks several basic principles and while Russia
benefited from that, Ukraine only lost,” Yushchenko said adding that:
“The government is responsible for that and those were fatal mistakes.”
“I don’t think an agreement that is based on such non-market
principles added any stability to gas supplies to Europe,” the
Ukrainian president said.
If Ukraine managed to increase tariffs for gas transportation via
its territory to even the lowest level that European countries pay,
Naftogaz would have received an additional $2.5 billion, Yushchenko said.
