BRUSSELS, October 30. /TASS/. Trilateral gas talks between Russia, the European Union and Ukraine will be continued in the evening on October 30, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said on early on Thursday.
“I would like to say that the talks are not yet over,” he told journalists. “The discussion on documents to be prepared after the talks was long, and they are not ready yet. We agreed to continue our work tomorrow. I can say that key parameters to be the basis of these documents have been agreed. Agreements have been reached on the price, as we said earlier, on the debt rescheduling mechanism, on advance payment, on our partners’ request for certain volumes of gas in November-December. Now, it is technical work on the documents to be signed.”
The talks began on Wednesday evening to go on for more than 12 hours.
Earlier on Wednesday, the European Commission cancelled an official news conference saying the talks’ result might be known at 08:30am local time if the sides finally reached agreement.
The news conference however was once again postponed till Thursday evening and will depend on whether Ukraine and the European Commission manage to reach an agreement on finding gas supplies, a representative of the Russian Energy Ministry said.
The talks involving European Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger, Ukraine’s Minister of Energy and Coal Industry Yuriy Prodan, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak, and CEOs of Russia’s Gazprom and Ukraine’s Naftogaz are to yield an agreement on temporary procedure of gas supplies to Ukraine till late March 2015. The agreement is supposed to include terms of Ukraine’s repayment of gas debts to Gazprom, a gas price of $385 per 1,000 cubic metres to be used over this period and gas volumes Ukraine will need.
The central, most pressing problem is to find sources of financing or issue financial guarantees of Ukraine’s payment for Russian gas.