Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered a speech and had a Q&A session at the annual Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 17.
Unlike in his annual address to the Russian Federal Council in December, where Putin didn’t mention Ukraine at all, at the forum the Russian leader spoke a lot about it.
On Donbas autonomy
Putin spoke about the settlement of the conflict in the eastern part of the country that left over 9,000 people dead since March 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and sent its proxies to Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk Oblast, starting a war with the Ukrainian government.
In February 2015 a shaky ceasefire was reached through the Minsk peace agreements. In accordance with the deal, Ukraine was to give the occupied territories a special status of autonomy. The Ukrainian government has been saying that the special status is impossible until there is a stable ceasefire.
Putin disagrees. Speaking in Saint Petersburg, he said that Kyiv had to grant the special status to the occupied territories “as soon as possible.”
“They shoot, the others shoot back – and there you have a clash. Does it mean we shouldn’t carry out a political transformation?” Putin said, referring to the frequent ceasefire violations in Donbas.
“Ukraine has to pass a law on the special status of these territories that we call ‘unrecognized republics’,” he added.
When Ukrainian parliament was passing in the first reading the amendments to Constitution that aimed to decentralize power in Ukraine, right-wing groups who saw the amendments as a premise for giving a special status for Donbas, attacked the parliament, leaving four National Guard officers killed and injuring 131 officers.
On arming OSCE mission
Putin said he supported the suggestion to arm the OSCE Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, made by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko earlier this year.
It goes against the earlier statements by the Kremlin. On May 24 Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov spoke against allowing an armed OSCE mission into Ukrainian Donbas. And on June 1, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said that Russia still was against the armed OSCE mission.
Putin’s support for the idea may seem a breakthrough after it.
However, Putin didn’t mention introducing a special police mission of OSCE – which is the idea of Poroshenko – but said that OSCE monitors “should be allowed to carry firearms.”
Poroshenko insisted on sending the OSCE police mission to Donbas during his meeting with OSCE Parliamentary Assembly President Ilkka Kanerva on June 16.
On gas transit
On June 16, Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller said that Ukraine was charging too much for gas transit and that Gazprom may develop new gas transit ways north of Ukraine instead of prolonging the existing contract that is valid till 2019.
Russia used to pay Ukraine $2.5 for 1,000 cubic meters of gas to pass 100 kilometers, but according to Gazprom, Ukraine unilaterally upped the price to $4.5 in 2016. Gazprom threatened to challenge this decision in international courts and consider dropping Ukraine as a gas transporter.
Speaking in Saint Petersburg, Putin said that Russia isn’t going to stop transiting gas through Ukraine, but hinted that the transit may shrink.
“The previous years have shown that when someone has a monopoly, they are going to abuse it,” Putin said. “If Ukraine knows that it doesn’t have a monopoly on gas transit, its officials will stop their blackmail over it.”
Ukraine hasn’t been buying gas from Russia since November 2015, but has been transporting Russian gas to European customers through its gas transit system.
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