Russia and Ukraine on Wednesday announced a landmark deal to extend the lease of a Russian naval base in Crimea by 25 years in exchange for Kiev receiving a huge discount on gas imports.
The deal, announced after talks between Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev, is the most substantive result yet of the warming in Kiev-Moscow ties after Yanukovych’s election in February.
“The decision that has been taken is without precedent in the history of our relations,” Yanukovych said after the talks in the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, barely 50km from the Russian border.
The meeting saw the signing of agreements granting Ukraine a discount of around 30 percent on Russian gas imports and extending the lease of the Russian naval base for at least another quarter-century.
The Russian and Ukrainian parliaments will discuss whether to ratify the deal in simultaneous sessions next week, a Kremlin spokeswoman said on Wednesday, Russian news agencies reported.
“The reading will take place simultaneously next week on Tuesday April 27,” Medvedev’s spokeswoman Natalya Timakova told the RIA Novosti news agency, citing an agreement reached by the two presidents.
“Russia has won again and outplayed Ukraine on gas,” said analyst Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta political research center in Kiev. “The problem is the lease is very long. Ukraine will have Russian influence for a long time.”
Cash-strapped Ukraine was pushing to pay less for Russian gas to help keep down its budget deficit in line with IMF conditions for receiving the next disbursement of a crucial loan package.
Russia, meanwhile, has been working hard to secure the future of its Black Sea fleet base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol in southern Ukraine — a strategic facility for Russia’s military — when the current lease expires in 2017.
“Our Ukrainian partners will receive a discount on the gas price which will amount to 100 dollars if the price [per 1,000 cubic meter] exceeds 330 dollars or if the price is lower [it] will amount to 30 percent,” Medvedev said.
Yanukovych said the gas deal would be worth US$40 billion to Ukraine over the next 10 years.
The gas deal was signed by the heads of the Russian and Ukrainian state gas firms, but the accord on the Black Sea fleet was personally inked by the two presidents.
“We signed an agreement which says that the period of the presence of the Russian base is extended by 25 years,” said Medvedev, adding there was also the option of a further five-year extension. “This was a step we have awaited for a long time.”
The clearly delighted Russian president also made clear that the two agreements on gas and the Black Sea fleet were linked.
“The gas discount will be considered as part of the rent for the presence of our military base in Sevastopol,” he said.
Gas remains a hugely sensitive issue between Moscow and Kiev after a bitter row in January last year led to Russia turning off the taps to Ukraine, which in turn left many European countries short of gas.
The accords immediately aroused the ire of Ukraine’s pro-Western politicians, who have repeatedly accused Yanukovych of seeking to sell out Ukrainian national interests to Moscow.
Former Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine party called for Yanukovych’s impeachment.
“A president who breaches the norms of the Ukrainian Constitution ... on a ban on hosting foreign military bases on Ukrainian territory, should be deposed by impeachment,” the party said in a statement on its Web site.
The Our Ukraine party with its allies controls 72 seats out of 450 in the Ukrainian parliament, but would need a three-quarters majority to impeach the president, according to the country’s Constitution.
Yanukovych’s defeated rival in the presidential elections, Yulia Tymoshenko, vowed to annul the agreement in the Ukrainian parliament, the Interfax-Ukraine news agency reported.
“We must show there is a threat to Ukraine’s national interests, to Ukraine itself as a sovereign state,” pro-Western former parliament speaker Arseniy Yatseniuk said.
Russian-Ukrainian relations plunged to a post-Soviet low under Yushchenko, Yanukovych’s predecessor, whose staunchly pro-Western policies riled Moscow so much that Medvedev refused to have any dealings with him.
The election of Yanukovych, however, marked the defeat of the leaders of the 2004 Orange Revolution, Yushchenko and Tymoshenko, who had swept to power on promises to build a prosperous Ukraine firmly anchored in Europe and free of Russian influence.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion