Maidan

MOSCOW, March 10. (RIA Novosti) -- Kyiv is again reaching out to Germany with a concept of a trilateral gas transport consortium. Ukraine recently made a proposal to hold Russia-Ukraine-Germany negotiations on the issue, writes Gazeta. In 2002, then President of Ukraine Leonid Kuchma, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder put forward the idea of a consortium, and the relevant papers were signed in Kyiv between Russia's Gazprom and Ukraine's Naftogaz Ukrainy in January 2003. However, Ukraine wanted to sell Russian natural gas to the West itself. Moscow said the consortium should have Ukrainian gas pipelines as a compromise, but Ukraine did not agree. As a result, the consortium was left with simply building a new pipeline. Ukraine's new leader, Viktor Yushchenko, has reached out to Germany once again. According to Naftogaz Ukrainy chairman Alexei Ivchenko, Kyiv sees Germany's role in the consortium as the buyer, Ukraine's as the transit agent, and Russia's as the supplier. Gazprom has expressed its surprise at the news. A spokesman said the two-party consortium has already been established, and it has its own business issues to be settled between the two participants. Alexei Makarkin, the deputy head of the Center for Political Technologies, says the Ukrainians had previously hoped to strengthen the Western role in the consortium at Russia's expense. However, he says, Gazprom has been in partnership with Germany much longer than Naftogaz, so Kyiv will have to make some concessions. Mr. Yushchenko's claims that Russia and Ukraine are eternal partners now seem to be of little worth, since Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko has already promised to stop the reverse motion of Russian oil through the pipeline to the West in favor of Kazakh oil, and local lawmakers have proposed reversing the privatization of Ukrtatnaft, a Russian-majority-owned Ukrainian company. Mr. Ivchenko said yesterday that as regards gas supplies from Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Germany were intending to launch a Ukrainian-German-Polish European gas trading initiative. This move could undermine Russia's interests, experts say, as it will compete with Gazprom in Europe. http://en.rian.ru/rian/index.cfm?prd_id=160& msg_id=5456278&startrow=1&date=2005-03-10&do_alert=0