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Russian foreign ministry: Ukraine must buy gas at price fixed in 2009 contract

MOSCOW, April 11. /ITAR-TASS/. Ukraine must buy gas at a price fixed in the current gas contract that was signed in January 2009 by the Ukrainian government, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Friday.

“Ukraine must buy gas exactly at a price that was fixed in the current contract signed in January 2009 by the Ukrainian government headed by the Batkivshchina (Fatherland) party, whose representatives are now ruling in Kiev,” the ministry stressed, adding that the Ukrainian side had had no doubts in the contract’s market nature when it was signing it.

“On Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin sent a extensive address to the leaders of a number of European countries, where he reiterated our commitment to continue efforts to find a flexible, mutually acceptable solution to the gas problem with due account of the difficult situation Ukraine is now facing,” the ministry noted. “We have always done much more than others to keep Ukraine’s economy running, to prevent an utter imbalance of its budgetary and financial system.”

“Many of the addressees had barely familiarized themselves with Putin’s address, when public comments came from Washington,” the Russian Foreign Ministry noted. “It is beyond the diplomatic protocol when somebody not merely reads letters addressed to other people but affords to say anything about them in public bypassing the addressee.”

“The U.S. Department of State had no scruples to call Russia’s position a manifestation of blackmailing and called to sell gas to Ukraine at market prices,” the ministry said.

“They are speaking in Kiev, at responsible levels, about the importance “not to deprive Ukraine of the possibility to join NATO,” the ministry went on to say. “Despite the fact that in private conversations and in public, representatives from Western countries, including their leaders, pledge the opposite, none of them corrects Ukrainian colleagues, none of them dares to cultivate in Ukraine’s leaders realistic views on the “military political future” of that country.”

“The West demonstrates no reaction to Russophobic, chauvinistic and extremist calls coming from the Verkhovna Rada [Ukraine’s parliament], to neo-Nazi’s rampaging of offices of the Ukrainian Communist Party, to ongoing outrage of the Right Sector,” the ministry stressed.