Ukraine claims gas deal with Russia
Ukraine and Russia yesterday stood on the verge of resolving their latest gas war in time to keep the war-scarred nation and EU clients warm through the winter months.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said he and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin had reached a price deal at high-stakes talks in Milan on Friday that otherwise focused on the six-month pro-Kremlin revolt convulsing the ex-Soviet state's separatist east.
Two meetings mediated by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande -- as well as a brief exchange on their own -- marked the two leaders' most in-depth dialogue since Poroshenko's May election.
Poroshenko said the meetings produced the broad outlines of a deal that could see Russia halt the gas supply cutoff it began in June -- its third in less than 10 years.
He said a more detailed protocol agreement due to be completed by Tuesday will see Ukraine meet Russia's demand and pay $385 per 1,000 cubic metres of gas for deliveries guaranteed through the end of March.
Meanwhile, German intelligence has accused pro-Russian rebels of shooting down a Malaysian passenger jet over Ukraine using missiles captured from government forces, a media report said yesterday.
Kiev and the West have previously charged that Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was blown out of the sky in July by separatist fighters using a BUK surface-to-air system supplied by Russia, charges denied by Moscow. But the head of Germany's BND foreign spy agency said intelligence indicated the rebels had captured a BUK system from a Ukrainian base and fired a missile that exploded directly next to the plane, Spiegel magazine reported.
The MH17 crashed on July 17 as it flew over rebel-held territory in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board, 153 of them Dutch.
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