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Gazprom: gas supplies to Ukraine can stop in two days

Cessation of natural gas deliveries to Ukraine will jeopardize supplies to Europe

MOSCOW, February 24. There's 219 million cubic meters of Russian gas left that Ukraine has prepaid for, no new prepayments have been submitted yet, Russian gas giant Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller told journalists on Tuesday.

According to Miller, supplying 114 million cubic meters of natural gas to Ukraine daily will lead to cessation of deliveries in two days, which will jeopardize natural gas supplies to Europe.

On Monday Ukraine's Naftogaz claimed that Russia had breached the agreements reached in Brussels by not supplying the prepaid ammounts of gas to Ukraine.

Russia-Ukraine gas dispute in 2014

Last year saw another one in a series of disputes between Russia’s gas giant Gazprom and Ukraine’s Naftogaz oil and gas company over natural gas supplies, prices, and debts. Such disputes over the years have grown into major matters involving other countries and taking months to solve.

Russia stopped gas flows to Ukraine in June after Ukraine's  Naftogaz oil and gas company stopped paying for the consumed Russian natural gas on March 25. Russia was ready to resume natural gas supplies to Ukraine on condition of debt repayment and upfront payments for new gas deliveries. As of August 1, the overall debt of Naftogaz to Gazprom for supplied gas amounted to about $5.3 billion.

Several months of trilateral talks between between Russia, Ukraine and the European Union resulted in an agreement reached on October 30. According to the agreement, Ukraine was to pay (in advance) $378 per 1,000 cubic meters to the end of 2014, and $365 in the first quarter of 2015. As for the debt, Ukraine agreed to pay $1.45 billion to Gazprom immediately, and another $1.65 billion by the end of 2014.