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Ukraine might fail to pay for gas – Putin to EU
Published: 01 November, 2009, 22:51
Edited: 02 November, 2009, 19:58
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has informed his Swedish counterpart of possible Ukrainian problems paying for Russian gas and its transit to European consumers.
Cut the supply off untill real efforts are made to pay. What would happen if I did not pay my gas bill? Get cut off. Rightly so,in my view.
dipre, Well of course, that goes without saying; but give the other people involved fair warning first. That way they can make what alternative arrangements they are are capable of.
The solution to this little problem can be very easily solved. Hillary has the solution to all the world problems, both big and small. Just ask her.
Putin has been warning about Ukraine's likely default on the gas contract with his recent public speeches. He warned about it in a meeting with the Danish Prime Minister just today. Ukraine is a financial basket case and cannot pay the bill - just like last year and just like 2006. Meanwhile, Yushenko has been running a PR campaign against Russia for years now and Ukraine's Naftogaz stole $$ billions in gas last winter. Gazprom was pumping gas into Ukraine for most of a day last January and nothing was leaving that so-called "transit" country, before the gas finally got shut off. If the Europeans want to dink around and pretend there is no problem until THEIR gas gets cut off - again - I suppose they are free to do so. Pretty stupid, though. Do they think Russia will knuckle under this time and give gas away for free? If I lived in a country dependent on gas piped through Ukraine, I would be buying electric heaters for resale in January. The price will be WAY UP then and I might make a nice profit. I noticed that Yushenko announced again today that he wants a "review" of the contract Timoshenko signed with Gazprom last January. It sounds like Yushenko is gearing up his propaganda engine to default again, and blame Russia for it - again.
Well, gas pipelines are expensive to build, but if this reoccurring problem is bad enough, aka if it costs billions of dollars every time it happens, then it would warrant building around Ukraine and therefore making it so that Ukraine would mostly just hurt itself when it did things like this. Perhaps Russia shouldn't have intensified the diplomatic row by delaying the new ambassadorship and such. It is at any rate stupid that other countries should have pay the cost for this feud. Hopefully the Ukrainians will eventually elect a government that is neither anti-western nor anti-Russian so that Ukraine and its partners can reap the optimal aggregate benefits of international exchange.