From Reuters:
Ukraine should be able to find ways of paying for Russian gas supplies within a week, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said on Wednesday, suggesting a standoff would end once Moscow received financial guarantees from Kyiv.
The latest round of gas talks between Moscow and Kyiv ended late on Tuesday in Brussels with no agreement in a dispute that prompted Russia to cut off gas supplies to its neighbor in mid-June, potentially hurting flows west to the European Union.
But while Novak said he was optimistic for new talks on October 29, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said he was skeptical about building ties with Russia, underlining how efforts to reach a deal are hampered by a wider political conflict between the two countries.
On Tuesday, Russia increased the pressure on Ukraine, which is dependent on Western aid, demanding assurances on how Kyiv would find the money to pay Moscow. Earlier Ukraine asked the European Union for a further 2 billion euros in credit.
Novak told reporters at an energy conference in Moscow that the two sides had almost reached a deal but that the talks came unstuck "by another issue -- where will Ukraine get the money to pay in advance for gas supplies in November and December."
"If the Ukrainians have the money, then the documents will be signed. If not, then we will wait."
Latest #Ukraine pre-election poll by @dem_initiatives has Lyashko's Radical party 2nd at 12.7% http://t.co/K3lrtecVNy pic.twitter.com/PIQg8pJr2A
— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) October 22, 2014
“This is clearly not just about Ukraine, but about Russia’s ambitions in the whole neighbourhood” w/ Andrew Wilson http://t.co/2T6N4HKRud
— toomas hendrik ilves (@IlvesToomas) October 22, 2014
Here's one of the stand-out quotes from the interview tweeted above:
SRB: What do you think this conflict, or crisis, means for the West and how does that affect East-West relations?
AW: Clearly, Russia is doing what it’s doing because it thinks we’re weak and divided, slow to react. We haven’t entirely been slow. By hook or by crook, we’ve got to roughly the right position on sanctions – whether we would have done so without the MH17 tragedy we don’t know, though to be fair America had announced the same sanctions the day before. We are now in a position where sanctions are doing a lot of damage to the Russian economy.
But more broadly, Russia thinks it can play at divide-and-rule, thinks our attention span is limited and that we’re already fleeting on to the next crisis in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. That’s true, and in this sense we have an attention deficit disorder and Russia can stay more focused and exploit that. The crisis has also shown how Russian channels of influence-pedalling extend beyond the former USSR; how Russia operates through propaganda in Europe; how it exploits certain anti-systemic forces and political parties.
This is not always the case though. It was really interesting to read Russia’s commentary on the Scottish referendum. They simply couldn’t understand that a) it was really democratic and b) that the separatists didn’t win. They are locked into this expectation that Europe is collapsing and corrupt. So it had to be a fix, according to Russia. Obviously, it wasn’t.
This a real challenge to the West in terms of devising an effective policy response. Sanctions have roughly got to the right place, though I don’t think Germany has played a very good role, pushing for a bad peace. Germans don’t understand Putin’s modus operandi. The Germans pushed Ukraine into this stupid compromise of delaying the EU Association Agreement and Putin just tried to renegotiate the whole agreement. So there are people in Europe who don’t understand how Russia works.
And for America there are big challenges about how far it can retreat from its traditional global policeman role. If troubles just flare up in the areas they pay less attention to, there’s no net gain. When they come back they have to work even harder to stabilize things. So America has been playing less attention to Eastern Europe. How much more it will now pay is a test of America’s smart power. America really believes that financial sanctions can do the traditional work of armies and drones. We’ll see.