Moscow is seeking for prevent EU from exporting Russian gas to Ukraine. It threatens to cut off all of lifelines of Kiev which may intensify Ukrainian energy crisis in this winter.
When Moscow gives out threat, officials of EU are preparing new sanctions on Rosneft, Gazprom Neft and Transneft, which will limit the capacity of those corporations entering into the Western financial market.
However, if the cease-fire agreement signed between Kiev and separatist supported by Russia in the eastern last week can be sustained, EU may put off sanctions.
In June, Russia cut off all of gas supply to Ukraine. If EU fails to make a match to reach a gas supply contract, Ukraine will be faced with rigorous energy shortage in winter.
To compensate the influence caused by losing Russian gas, Ukraine is seeking for receiving
gas supply from EU through reverse flow, importing Russian gas from Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and other countries. However, Gaszprom had already complained about reexporting. Alexei Miller, the CEO of Gazprom criticized reexport as fraud.
Eastern Europe states that Gazprom proposes to reduce export volume so that customers have no rest gas to supply to Ukraine. An ambassador in the Middle Europe said, “They talk about this quite openly.”
Another officials in the Eastern Europe showed that the reduction would increase the risks of cutting off supply to EU and price rising. While Gazprom denied that they had ever threatened to reduce export volume to EU.
The volume of gas received by Ukraine through reverse flow is quite limited. Slovakia can export about 1.76 billion cubic meters of gas per day, 1.6 million cubic meters in Hungry and 4 million cubic meters in Poland. However, Ukrainian annual gas consumption is about 50 billion cubic meters and about half of demands rely on import. Analysts estimate that if Ukraine cannot import 5 billion or 10 billion cubic meters of gas, it will pass the winter with difficulties. Extreme low efficiency and coal output constant reduction cause the situation worse.
