Kyiv Post: Ukraine’s energy security hostage to domestic pricing, not Russia
You may have noticed that Ukrainian government officials, as well as the country’s opposition politicians, never seem to tire of commenting on the status of the ongoing “natural gas price negotiations” between Ukraine and Russia.
One politician says that the pricing formula is unfair, a second that the transit volumes through the Ukrainian pipeline should be guaranteed, a third that the pipeline should be managed by a three-way European Union-Ukrainian-Russian consortium, a fourth that a giant new terminal should be built on the Black Sea for diversification purposes. And so on and so on.
Ukraine’s various political camps have been blaming each other for the high Russian gas price for as long as anyone can remember.
Conveniently, in the course of such recriminations, Ukraine’s 20-year, decidedly non-partisan corruption and mismanagement of its own domestic energy sector rarely surfaces for discussion.
The global media has its own fetish for the Ukrainian-Russian gas topic. After the famous 2006 and 2009 “gas wars” that cut Russian gas supplies to Europe in mid-winter, it’s always an easy story for Reuters, AP or Euronews to pull out of the file to get the man on the street’s attention for a couple of minutes.
The latest outbreak of frigid winter weather renews fears in Europe of another “gas war,” making for some dependable theater on a slow news day
Russia’s leaders clearly do not mind the media circus surrounding the gas situation, as it tends to aid their ongoing public relations campaign to cast the Ukrainian state as an unreliable and unstable player on the international stage.
The Ukrainian-Russian “gas question,” has turned into a massive smokescreen which usefully serves the purposes of all sides, even though none of the basic issues ever really change or are fundamentally resolved by the negotiations.
The mundane truth is that Ukraine’s energy woes are only marginally related to the celebrated Russian gas price. Media reports generally do not mention that Ukraine is itself a major producer of natural gas, with more than 1 trillion cubic meters of proven reserves, and that it is the inefficient use of this vast domestic resource that is the real root of the trouble. MORE