Gazprom to study legality of Ukrainian gas imports from Europe, says Miller
Ukraine's purchases of pipeline gas from suppliers in Europe may violate its contracts with Gazprom and the Russian gas giant plans to study the process in concert with independent experts and possibly hold Ukraine accountable.
"Physically reversing the direction of gas flow [to import gas] from Europe is impossible. There is no separate gas pipeline," Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller said in response to a reporter's question.
"Therefore, these can only be some kind of 'paper,' opaque operations, whose legality needs to be investigated: if the 'virtual reverse' uses our transit gas, that is a direct violation for which there must be an accounting," Miller said.
"These things are being checked and are verifiable. We have previous experience of hiring independent monitoring companies to monitor the operations with our gas in Ukraine. We are confident that no serious European companies would participate in dubious gas deals with Ukraine that rely on Gazprom gas that doesn't belong to [Ukrainian oil and gas company] Naftogaz [Ukrainy]," Miller said.
