“By now, the situation surrounding gas supplies to Ukraine is as follows. As announced last night, at the moment we don’t have a contract for gas supply to Ukrainian consumers. That is why we don’t have any grounds to effectuate gas deliveries.

Today, starting from 10.00, our dispatch services and production units have reduced gas supplies to Ukrainian consumers. The latest figures are as follows. Given the gas consumption volumes in Ukraine and the requests for gas deliveries abroad, supplies to Ukraine have been cut by 100 per cent, i.e. 110 million cubic meters of gas a day. Supplies across the Ukrainian territory intended for export have been increased by around 20 million cubic meters of gas a day up to 326 million cubic meters of gas a day.

For this purpose we have cut gas withdrawals from underground storage facilities. This cut doesn’t affect the levels of gas production by our units. There have emerged statements from the Ukrainian side about what price and tariff levels they would agree to. But these statements came after the Ukrainian delegation had left Gazprom premises. In effect, our disagreement over the gas prices is not the main problem. The problem is that the Naftogaz Ukrainy delegation simply had no mandate for signing a new contract. That is why it is not quite appropriate now to discuss possible gas price levels over the radio. We are urging to continue the talks. But the Naftogaz delegation hasn’t arrived yet, and there haven’t been any signals from the Ukrainian side,” OAO Gazprom official spokesman Sergey Kupriyanov told reporters.