16th Ukraine Breakfast Debate: “Energy for Europe: Which role does Ukraine play in European energy security?”
The current gas transit contract between Russia and Ukraine expires at the end of this year. Although Ukraine and Russia — under mediation of the European Commission — has been negotiating a new contract for months, no replacement treaty has been signed yet. The talks are overshadowed by mutual lawsuits against the Russian supplier Gazprom and the Ukrainian counterpart Naftogaz, the degeneration of gas relations since the Russian occupation of Crimea, and the gas transit diversification projects Nord Stream II and Turk Stream, which bypass Ukraine and endanger crucial revenues in transit fees.
At the same time, Ukraine is in the midst of energy sector reforms, which include the alignment to the EU-regulations and the unbundling of Naftogaz into three independent enterprises for production, transport, and sales of gas products.
To shed light on the last developments in reaching a gas agreement and the role of the EU for the Ukrainian energy market we dedicated our 16th Ukraine Breakfast Debate to the topic “Energy for Europe: Which role does Ukraine play in European energy security?”. The debate took place on Thursday, 28 November 2019 at the Institut für Europäische Politik in Berlin.
The event was opened with a keynote by Former Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin focusing on the political context of gas transit. Together with our experts Alyona Osmolovskaya, Press Secretary of Naftogaz (Kyiv), Dr. Olena Pavlenko, Director of DiXi Group (Kyiv) and Dr. Thomas O’Donnell, Lecturer at the Hertie School of Governance (Berlin) we discussed the positions and interests of international and national actors and address the following questions:
- How could the trilateral negotiations on a new transit deal run more successful?
- What are the main results of the lawsuits between Russia and Ukraine and how do they influence the trilateral gas negotiation?
- How is it possible to ensure the gas transit through Ukraine after the construction of Nord Stream 2?
- How dependent are Ukraine and the European Union on each other in terms of energy issues?
This event was part of the new project “German Ukrainian Researchers Network” (GURN). GURN aims at establishing a German-Ukrainian network for senior and junior researchers and their organisations, strengthening country expertise and promoting joint cooperation projects. GURN is conducted in close cooperation with the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation (DIF, Kyiv), the think tank development and research initiative think twice UA (Kyiv), the New Europe Center (NEC, Kyiv) and is kindly supported by the Federal Foreign Office.
