MOSCOW, November 5. /TASS/. Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov considers any gas agreements between Russia and Ukraine hardly possible with legal claims remaining in place.
"Continuing arbitration claims make it next to impossible to reach any agreements," he told reporters on Tuesday.
Peskov added that "nothing has changed since [Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin stated his view on that issue at the press conference in Budapest."
The Russian leader said on October 30 in Budapest that Moscow and Kiev need to reduce mutual claims in the gas dispute to zero.
Ukraine’s Naftogaz filed a new request with the Stockholm Arbitration Court last week against Gazprom, which suggests that the Russian gas giant should be ordered to revise the gas transit tariff and pay a total of $12.248 bln as various compensations.
The most recent round of trilateral consultations between Russia, the European Union, and Ukraine on gas transit to Europe was held on October 28 in Brussels. According to its results, the parties for the first time since 2014 started talking about resuming direct deliveries of the Russian gas to Ukraine. Another round of trilateral consultations on gas transit to Europe is planned in November.