Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Russia and Ukraine Move Toward Resolution of Feud Over Natural Gas Payments

MOSCOW — A natural gas payment dispute between Russia and Ukraine that had been casting a shadow over European energy markets appeared to be winding down on Friday, as both sides agreed to European-brokered negotiations next week in Brussels.

A key sticking point had already been cleared up on Thursday when Russia’s Gazprom, for unexplained reasons, quietly backed away from its insistence that Ukraine pay for the fuel Gazprom was sending to the Kiev government’s enemies, the rebel movements in eastern Ukraine.

For now, that demand would be set aside, said a Gazprom spokesman, Sergei Kupriyanov.

“We are ready at the moment to exclude our gas supplies to Donbass from our discussions,” he said, referring to the Donets Basin, the contested industrial and coal-mining district of the east.

Gazprom’s customer, the Ukrainian energy company Naftogaz, had vehemently objected that it had not requested that natural gas it had paid for in advance be sent down two pipelines directly into rebel territory.

With that cleared up, Naftogaz made a payment of $15 million on Friday morning. Russia’s energy minister suggested that this would be sufficient to keep fuel flowing to Ukraine over the weekend, long enough to avoid a shut-off before the new round of talks, scheduled for Monday.

Ukrainian officials say they want to supply natural gas to rebel areas from pipelines inside the country, rather than directly from Russia, and that they did not intentionally cut supplies but that pipelines were damaged during fighting.

In eastern Ukraine, low-level combat flared on Friday after two days without any deaths and despite a truce signed on Feb. 12. The Ukrainian military reported that three soldiers had died over the past day, and President Petro O. Poroshenko said Russia would continue to pose a military threat, even if the cease-fire holds.

In Spain, police on Friday carried out the first arrests in Western Europe of citizens accused of traveling to Ukraine to fight on the side of the Russian-backed rebels. Eight Spaniards who had recently returned from Ukraine were arrested in dawn raids across different regions of Spain, including in Madrid and Barcelona, the Interior Ministry said in a statement.

The ministry said that they had been identified partly by information that the eight had posted online, including photographs of themselves wearing paramilitary uniforms and training with explosives and assault rifles. The fighters are likely to be charged with participating in activities considered to be terrorism by Ukraine, the ministry said, including taking part in assassinations and carrying illegal weapons.

Francisco de Borja Lasheras, associate director of the Madrid office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a research organization, said it was not surprising that some Spaniards would want to join the fight on behalf of the rebels.

There has been “a long narrative among certain segments of the Spanish left that anything that happens in Eastern Europe is a C.I.A. conspiracy and part of a Western imperialist agenda,” he said. That narrative, he suggested, blended with “a certain nostalgia for the Soviet Union” that could be traced back to the Spanish Civil War, when “the Soviet Union was the only power supporting directly the Spanish Communists.”

For Gazprom and Russia, the dropped demand that Ukraine pay the gas bill for breakaway regions represented a rare decision to back down.

For days, senior Russian officials, including Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev, had been insisting Ukraine pay for the rebel fuel supply. President Vladimir V. Putin said Ukraine’s effort to cut supplies to the breakaway regions “smelled of genocide.”

Plagued by falling market share in its core market in Europe and far from opening new pipelines to China, Gazprom’s economic clout is waning, though it is unclear what role this or the risk of sanctions played in the turnaround.

“This is obviously a time when they would want to be conciliatory,” Jonathan P. Stern, the chairman of natural gas research at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, said in a telephone interview. Gazprom, he said, is heading into a difficult period financially.

The gas company’s contracts in Europe are tied to oil prices with about a six-month lag, meaning its earnings and financial leverage in the Ukraine conflict will taper off after the second quarter of this year, when last fall’s oil price tumble will start to echo in the gas market.

Gazprom will need about $5 billion in external financing this year, and “going forward it will become more difficult” as reserves dwindle and domestic financing dries up, Ildar Davletshin, oil and gas analyst at Renaissance Capital, said in a telephone interview.

Keeping a lifeline of Western finance open to Gazprom is more important than ever now that Russia’s other big state energy company, Rosneft, has been forced to appeal for government bailouts.

Raphael Minder contributed reporting from Madrid.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Russia and Ukraine Move Toward Resolution of Feud Over Natural Gas Payments. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT