Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-01-14-Speech-3-353"
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"en.20090114.17.3-353"2
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"Mr President, I can endorse the view of many fellow Members. What has unfolded in recent weeks has led to great surprise. Even yesterday, I found myself considerably irritated when I listened to Russian and Ukrainian counterparts declaring here that they were certainly not at fault. We are constantly receiving contradictory information about what exactly is going on. We hear one story, then another, and it is very difficult for us MEPs to find out the precise facts. We hope that this confusion will be resolved in the next few days and that gas, as promised, will flow once more.
Should gas flow once more, does this mean we go back to business as usual? I should not think so. In 2006, the same thing happened, but then the impact on the European Union was far less serious; the cause of the conflict between Moscow and Kiev back then was the gas price, which resulted in a break in the gas supplies to Europe. We warned back then that there was a risk of a repeat scenario, and that has now come to pass. We know that gas supplies are re-negotiated every year, because Ukraine and Russia work with one-year contracts. It was not until last month, when the crisis broke out again, that the European Union swung into action. Much of what we already discussed in 2006 has eventually failed to have any effect. Even then, we knew we were too dependent on one pipeline that supplies nearly 80% of the gas via one country. Even then, it was discussed that we should work on alternative supply routes as a matter of urgency. Even then, it was clear that we were not entirely sure if we could help each other as EU countries in the event of problems in certain countries, as is currently the case in Bulgaria, Slovakia and a number of other countries. Little has been done about this in recent years. It became clear in recent weeks how difficult it is to put a mechanism in place with which we can help each other out.
Russia and Ukraine have dealt themselves and their reputations heavy blows. It is, in my view, not up to us in the first instance to blame one country or the other. What is obvious is that both countries have little awareness when it comes to customer-friendliness. In actual fact, they are now causing major detriment to their top customer. We are one of Russia’s good customers, we pay for this pipeline through Ukraine, we pay our bills on time and we pay global prices for the gas. I think that this cannot be hammered home enough to both parties.
This situation does throw up a number of questions, of course. What about the conflict of interest in the gas sector in Russia, the Kremlin’s influence on Gazprom? I happen to be a little more knowledgeable about Ukraine and I know from experience that the gas business in that country is a very shady one; I believe that we should look into a number of matters in greater detail. Like Mr Swoboda, I am in favour of a parliamentary inquiry into how this situation came about, into what the EU failed to do that it should have done in recent years, and into how exactly these gas sectors in Ukraine and in Russia are set up, so that we might be able to prevent a similar situation from happening again in future, or gain a better understanding of what is going on right now."@en1
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