On stopping gas transit: Kyiv withstood the onslaught of the Kremlin’s Trojan horses in the EU
OPINION
Michael Gonchar, President of the Center for Global Studies “Strategy XXI”.
So, it’s done! Kyiv has withstood the onslaught of the Kremlin’s Trojan horses in the EU, resisted the corrupt offers of “Azerbaijani” or other gas, and eventually forced Moscow to stop exporting gas to Europe via Ukraine. In this way, the aggressor will lose about 6-6.5 billion dollars. The aggressor will lose about $6-6.5 billion in annual income from gas exports, which is one of the channels of financing the war.
Given the historical scale of the event – the end of more than half a century of Russian gas exports to Europe through Ukraine – it is worth mentioning some little-known facts.
Before the Soviet Union became an exporter of gas on the East-West line, gas within the USSR in the 50s and 70s moved from west to east. And it was Ukrainian gas, produced both in the west of the country – the Dashava field – and in the east – Shebelynka. The Dashava-Kyiv-Bryansk-Moscow and Dashava-Minsk-Vilnius-Riga gas pipelines supplied natural gas from western Ukrainian fields to Russia and other USSR republics (see the map of the Dashava-Kyiv-Moscow gas pipeline with the “Secret” and “Declassified” markings).
The modern East-West route of natural gas flows from the giant fields of Central Asia, the Urals and Western Siberia to Europe was formed during the 60s and 80s of the twentieth century during the Cold War. Initially, gas exports were directed only to certain Soviet satellite countries in Eastern Europe – members of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) and the Warsaw Pact (WP) – Poland and Czechoslovakia, and later to neutral Austria and Finland.
The aggravation of Soviet-Chinese relations up to the armed conflict in March 1969 over Damansky Island on the Amur River put the USSR, according to the Kremlin’s vision of the time, in danger of a two-front war with the United States and NATO in the west and China in the east. This prompted the Soviet leadership to move to a policy of détente in relations with the West, especially since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis had ended in the USSR’s favor. The start of negotiations between the USSR and the United States on strategic offensive arms limitation in November 1969 in Helsinki accelerated the signing of the famous 20-year gas-pipe contract between the governments of the Soviet Union and West Germany. With its signing, large-scale projects for the construction of transcontinental gas transportation systems began to be implemented, which were supposed to bring natural gas to Western Europe – Germany, Italy, and France.
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It remains a little-known fact that the first exports of natural gas from the USSR came from fields located in the western part of Ukraine. Westward gas exports, which began from Poland in 1956, were expanded by exports through a new pipeline symbolically named Bratstvo (Dolyna-Uzhhorod-State Border). It began to supply natural gas to the Czechoslovak Republic. The Brotherhood was launched in 1967, and the following year the pipeline was extended from Slovakia beyond the Eastern Bloc and gas began to flow to neutral Austria.
Another little-known fact is that design work on the main Soviet gas transportation systems was carried out in Ukraine, in Kyiv. After the liberation of Ukraine from Nazi occupation on September 29, 1944, Ukrdiprogazpalprom, the Ukrainian branch of the Moscow-based State Institute for the Design of Industrial Liquid Fuels and Gas Enterprises Diprogazpalprom, was established in Kyiv. After a series of transformations, this Ukrainian design organization became the All-Union Research and Design Institute for Natural Gas Transportation “VNDPITransgaz” of the USSR Ministry of Gas Industry. It was this institute that developed the design documentation for the first main gas pipelines both within the USSR and export pipelines, including Dashava-Kyiv-Bryansk-Moscow, Soyuz (Orenburg-Western Border of the USSR), Progress (Yamburg-Western Border of the USSR), Central Asia-Center, USSR-National Republic of Bulgaria, Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhhorod, Torzhok-Dolyna, and many others in Russia.
It is worth recalling that these large-scale infrastructure projects were implemented to increase foreign exchange earnings for the USSR, which needed them to achieve military parity with the United States and NATO. This could be achieved by exporting energy to NATO and the European Economic Community (EEC). However, the Soviet leadership was not guided by currency needs alone. The purpose of the large-scale increase in oil and gas exports was to make Western Europe dependent on the USSR, to separate it from the United States, and to make neutral Austria and Finland more favorable to Moscow.
Ivan Diyak, a corresponding member of the Academy of Mining Sciences of Ukraine, who held senior positions at the Ukrainian state-owned company Ukrgazprom in 1972-1998 and was directly involved in the construction of Soviet gas pipelines, emphasizes the period of the early 1980s. According to his recollections, it was then that the Soviet leadership finally formulated the strategic goal of creating transcontinental East-West gas transportation systems: “The CPSU Central Committee sets the task of building gas pipelines that will allow supplying up to 70% of the required gas to Western Europe – this will ensure that European countries will be completely dependent on Soviet energy resources… The USSR will be able to economically and politically influence Western Europe. In addition, this would make it possible to minimize the influence of the United States on European countries, which would help the USSR to become a world superpower.”
Russian experts also point to Soviet intentions to make the leading European economy dependent on gas supplies from the East, focusing on a fragment of the USSR Foreign Ministry’s note “On the Political Line and Some Practical Steps of the USSR in Connection with the Formation of the Willi Brandt Government in Germany”, which was presented to the CPSU Central Committee on December 1, 1969: “It may be important to reach an agreement on the supply of Soviet natural gas to Germany. We are talking about concluding a contract that would be valid for two decades and would make such an important sector of the German economy as energy to a certain extent dependent on the Soviet Union.”
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By the way, today is not only the New Year, but also St. Basil’s Day! Therefore, it is an opportunity to congratulate those industry veterans who created the Ukrainian gas transportation system, including the aforementioned Ivan Diyak and Vasyl Rozgonyuk, who used to hold senior positions at Ukrgazprom and Naftogaz. By the way, today is both Vasyl Rozgonyuk’s Angel’s Day and his birthday! So when you see him, congratulations!
And given that exactly 16 years ago, Gazprom, on the instructions of the Kremlin, launched an act of gas aggression against Ukraine and the EU, we should remember those who not only did not flinch but also skillfully showed Moscow “Kuzka’s mother” by reversing the GTS within 36 hours to supply gas from the western UGS facilities to the center, south and east, and leaving Moscow no chance to organize a Holodomor in the cold January 2009. Under the leadership of the then head of Naftogaz, Oleh Dubyna, and his deputy and engineering genius, Yaroslav Marchuk, the impossible was done, and after that both Russia and Europe concluded that “it turns out it was possible” and the possibility of reversing the use of gas pipelines became the norm in the EU. They and all of us did not even realize at the time that the Kremlin’s scenario had been thwarted.
The 2009 gas crisis had far-reaching goals. It was supposed to play the role of a detonator to provoke an East-West political conflict in Ukraine. The idea was that in the event of a complete cessation of gas supplies (transit to the EU for domestic consumption), the Ukrainian authorities would not be able to ensure that the main underground gas storage facilities located in the west of the country would be able to supply gas to the east, to the main industrial centers, which would be left without gas and heat. Thus, according to Russian strategists, this was supposed to provoke a “social explosion in the east and south of Ukraine”. It is no coincidence that on January 12, 2009, the Russian media published articles on the topic of “revision of borders” in the CIS and statements by Russian politicians: “Russian State Duma deputy Konstantin Zatulin does not rule out that Russia will “at the right time give a sign” to the southeastern regions of Ukraine to join Russia”. This sign could be given in a few days if the Ukrainian side agreed to Gazprom’s proposal of January 13 to resume gas transit to the Balkans and Turkey under its scheme. Naftogaz of Ukraine CEO Oleh Dubyna rejected the proposal: “The proposal that came from Russia to pump gas through the Ukrainian pipeline with the entrance to the Sudzha 1200 gas interconnector to Moldova, Bulgaria and Romania could threaten to cut off gas to Odesa, Dnipro, Donetsk.” If Kyiv were to accept Gazprom’s offer, residents of cities with populations of millions, as well as a number of smaller industrial cities in eastern and southern Ukraine, would undoubtedly take to the streets to protest if they were left without gas and heating at temperatures below -10°-15°C. And these protests would undoubtedly have had political demands and would have been supported by regional authorities, communists, and the Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, which have traditionally been pro-Russian and funded by Russian sources.
These are my memories from the events of today. We have struck the enemy on the gas front, while our soldiers are fighting to destroy the enemy. Congratulations Vasyl, donate to the Ukrainian Defense Forces, the rear and the front must be united, and this is how we will win!
P.S. Since Poland has taken over the EU presidency from today, and the country has finished consuming Russian energy resources and is a Baltic state, there is a good opportunity to put an end to Russian oil in the Baltic – to close the oil “window to Europe” for the aggressive Kremlin regime, as well as to remove the exceptions for pipeline oil supplies in the EU sanctions regime for Putin’s Trojan horses – the Orban and Fico regimes.
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