Memo to the EU: give Ukraine a better gas deal | beyondbrics

Memo to the EU: give Ukraine a better gas deal | beyondbrics:



"Thursday’s EU-brokered Ukraine-Russia gas deal restores energy flows to Ukraine, and thus also to Europe, that had been blocked by Moscow since June, ensuring that homes will be heated through the coming winter. However, beyond that obvious plus, it is a remarkably bad deal.



The agreement turns the gas back on for the next six months, for an undisclosed price, while the EU essentially buys Ukraine’s debt to Gazprom, putting Kiev in hock to Brussels instead of Moscow. What the deal doesn’t do is provide a transparent price point or any certainty beyond the end of the winter. Come the thaw, we can be pretty sure we’ll end up right back where we were.



Defenders of the deal and critics of Kiev make a useful point, summed up in a tweet by Harvard research fellow Simon Saradzhyan, who wrote, “Ukraine’s best friend should be Ukraine itself. Until they build [a] solvent, normal state, others [will] exploit [their] weakness.” At the end of the day, Ukraine has to look out for its own interests. No one will ever protect Ukraine as well as Kiev will – or as well as Kiev could, were it solvent. But it is not and never has been. It’s hard to see how it will ever be."



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