Proposals to preserve transit through Ukraine in exchange for unprofitable purchases of Russian gas for our country are unacceptable, Head of NJSC Naftogaz Ukrainy Yuriy Vitrenko said.
According to the company’s press service, commenting on the statement of Head of the board of Gazprom Alexei Miller about the readiness to ensure and increase the transit of gas through Ukraine with additional purchases of Russian gas, Vitrenko said that Ukraine would not accept “such discriminatory proposals.”
“Firstly, this [Miller’s statement] can be combined with Putin’s previous statements, which in fact are that they want Ukraine to negotiate directly with Russia. But these agreements, and Putin hinted at it directly, included the import of Russian gas. And it has always been the case that the Russians insisted that we buy a lot of Russian gas at a price that is significantly higher than the market price. The consequence of all this was that we paid on average $5 billion more for Russian gas than we received for transit,” Vitrenko said on the air of the Ukraine Today program on the Ukraine 24 television channel.
He said: “We do not need such an extension of transit, when Ukraine still has to pay extra to Russia. We now spend less on all imported gas than we receive for transit. Now Ukraine is in positive territory, we are receiving money in the state budget, which lead to the fact that money from Ukraine goes to Russia, we do not need.”
Vitrenko also called for a sober assessment of the reliability of any promises from Russia.
“Russia guaranteed us security within the Budapest Memorandum. We do not need the Budapest Memorandum 2. We cannot believe any guarantees of Russia after they had all the guarantees […] in a very cynical way they simply forgot about them, made a military invasion of Ukraine,” Vitrenko said.
