RUSSIA last night carried out its threat to cut gas supplies to Ukraine by another 25 per cent, but Kiev pledged deliveries to Britain and other western European countries would not be affected.
A spokesman for Ukraine's national gas company said the deepening row between the two countries would not impact on its substantial reserves.
Ukraine, under president Viktor Yushchenko, has persistently irritated the Kremlin with efforts to move o
ut of Russia's sphere of influence and become more closely integrated with the West, including seeking to join Nato.
The Russian gas monopoly Gazprom last month threatened to cut supplies to Ukraine over a £750 million debt. The countries are also in dispute over the use of middlemen companies in the gas trade.
Critics say the laborious arrangement is essentially a mechanism for siphoning money into private pockets.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) urged Russia and Ukraine to resolve the dispute in a commercial way. "The technique of cutting off supplies to achieve those higher prices is excessively harsh," said Ian Cronshaw, IEA's head of energy. "We would hope that the dispute would be settled in a more commercial way."
Much of the gas that Western Europe buys from Russia comes in pipelines that cross Ukraine. But a spokesman for Naftogaz, Ukraine's natural gas company, said the company "reserves the right to resort to adequate and symmetrical measures to defend the interests of its consumers."
Only about a quarter of the gas imported by Ukraine is of Russian origin; the rest comes from Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan in pipelines controlled by Gazprom.
Andris Piebalgs, the European energy commissioner, and Andrej Vizjak, of EU president Slovenia, said in a statement they had called for a determined effort to resolve the current disagreement and insisted supplies to the EU remain uninterrupted.
The full article contains 309 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
