Ukraine’s main gas company Naftogaz has reiterated, and warned, that it will not extend the transit contract currently in place with Russia. The contract entails the transport of Russian gas via Ukraine’s pipeline network to the European Union, it will be expiring end of 2023. In an interview on Deutsche Welle (DW), Naftogaz’s chairman of the board, Oleksiy Chernyshov, stated that “now we are not able to extend the contract, although the EU may raise this issue in the next month”. Ukraine’s official standpoint to still allow Russian gas via its territory is to support European countries still depending on the latter. The Naftogaz chairman also has called upon European countries to speed-up the phase-out of Russian gas consumption. He reiterated to do this before 2027.

The Ukrainian official also has been very critical about the current use of Russian gas by European countries. Chernyshov stated “it is ridiculous to support Russia by buying Russian gas during a war. And we see that Russia has used natural gas and oil as a weapon. They used energy as a weapon. And we say that cheap gas has its price”. Naftogaz however admits that it is hard up till now for Europe to wean itself totally from Russian gas imports, as the other options are not yet on level to mitigate all.

While discussing the country’s future, he reiterated that Ukraine wants to become a major energy hub for EU in future, especially linked to a potential natural gas storage option. “We all know that Ukraine has a very important and strategic asset – underground gas storage facilities. The largest, by the way, in Europe – 31 billion cubic meters. This can be used by European countries,” Chernyshov said.

At present, main Russian gas importers are Austria, Hungary and Italy, two which are depending on Ukrainian transit. To address the impact of a total Ukrainian blockade of Russian natural transit volumes, the following needs to be considered for Europeans.

At present, for the period January 2023 – August 2023, Ukraine has recorded a gas inflow of 43.6 million cubic meters for transit from Russia to Europe through the Sudzha route on August 20, 2023. To put the latter into perspective, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine transited nearly 110 million cubic meters of Russian gas to European countries via Sudzha and Sokhranivka, the two major transit points. Since May 11 2022  Ukraine’s Gas Transmission System Operator doesn’t have control over the facilities and thus declared a force majeure and informed Russian Gazprom that it would stop transiting gas through that route from May 11, 2022. The current Russian gas transit contract with Ukraine entails the option to transport 65 billion cubic meters of natural gas (2020), but the last years only 40 billion cubic meters is mentioned until 2024. In 2021, Ukraine transited 37 billion cubic meters of Russian gas directly to European Union (EU) countries, for which that route was the second-largest source of pipeline gas from Russia after Nord Stream.