By Kateryna Choursina
Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Ukraine is seeking an amendment to its gas contracts with Russia to waive fines for buying less gas than contracted this year, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said in a letter on his Web site addressed to his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev.
Unless existing gas contracts between Ukraine and Russia are changed, state-run NAK Naftogaz Ukrainy may be unable to prepare for the heating season starting at the end of next year, which could lead to “potential threats to the reliability of gas shipments to Ukraine and transit to other European states,” Yushchenko said in the letter.
The president wants to reduce volumes of natural gas that Ukraine imports under the contract to no more than 30 billion cubic meters a year, the letter reads. Yushchenko also wants the contracts to include the minimum amount of transit volumes on the “pump or pay” principle and “symmetrical responsibility of both parties for risks and symmetrical economically justified fines.”
The prime ministers of Russia and Ukraine in January signed a 10-year gas supply and transit contract after a spat which cut gas shipments to about 20 European nations for almost three weeks. Ukraine’s Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko said yesterday that the gas contract was not in the agenda of her meeting with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin at the Commonwealth of Independent States heads of state meeting in Yalta today.
To contact the reporter on this story: Kateryna Choursina in Moscow at kchoursina@bloomberg.net
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