More than 93 billion cubic meters of natural gas, which European companies buy from the Russian gas group Gazprom, were carried through the Ukrainian gas transportation system in 2017. The Ukraine’s state energy group Neftegaz and Gazprom concluded a gas transit contract under the Timoshenko government as recently as 2009.
It is worth recalling that Yulia Timoshenko, the then prime minister, received a seven years' sentence for abuse of office when brokering the above gas deal that imposed an outrageous price of $450 a thousand cubic meters on Ukraine. As a result, she spent three years in the Kachanovskaya female penal colony. According to critics, this country had the premier who showed no signs of intelligence, who behaved as if she was Mike Tyson or Bruce Lee to the fifth power, and who was the total antithesis to the official head of a government.
Observers think this country risks losing the transit of Russian gas or, if not all, carrying paltry amounts of it across its territory at the expiration of the 2009 gas transit contract on December 31, 2019. As a matter of fact, in 2015 Ukraine was unaware of the landmines it was stepping on when it refused to import Russian gas and started buying it from European companies. Funnily enough, this gas is mainly supplied by Gazprom to them.
Today Kiev is hell-bent on involving a foreign company in the transit of Russian gas lest its gas transportation system should lie idle. Maybe Ukraine will buy gas at a market price on the border between the Kharkov or Sumy region and a Russian oblast in the future. It would be still way cheaper than buying Russian gas on Ukraine's EU frontier.
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