Gazprom threatens to suspend gas supplies to Ukraine

Gazprom will not supply gas to Ukraine without contracts and hopes the debt problem will be settled until the New Year, the Russian company's spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov said on Saturday.

• There is no progress so far, he said in Vesti news broadcast on Russian television.
• There still is time to agree, he noted, warning that to supply gas without contracts was impossible.
• The world financial crisis has had no effect so far on gas consumption in Ukraine, and it has no connection with the debt settlement problem, he noted.
• Gazprom has done everything possible to settle the problem. “We have worked out a special scheme allowing Naftogaz of Ukraine to pay off, including advance payment for gas transit,” he explained.
• As soon as the debt is paid off, Gazprom is ready to conclude direct contracts, the Russian company’s representative pointed out.
• There has been so far no official reaction from the Ukrainian side to Gazprom’s warnings.
• The relations between Russia and Ukraine have always been acrimonious since the former Soviet era which was marked in 1932-33 by the big famine which wracked Ukraine prompting Kiev to accuse then the Stalinian regime of “genocide”.
• “The big famine reflected the perverse nature of the communist regime”, Ukrainian President Viktor Iouchtchenko said during a commemoration ceremony held Saturday in Kiev in the presence of his counterparts from Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.
• Kiev has, for several years now, been striving to have the 1932-33 big famine, which claimed the lives of between 4 and 10 million Ukrainians, recognized as a genocidal act against the Ukrainian people by the United Nations.
• The move has been bitterly opposed by Moscow.
• Last week, Russian President Dimitry Medvedev accused his Ukrainian opposite number of stoking the tension and seeking “to separate” the peoples of the two neighbouring countries.

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