Russia has appointed its first trade representative to Ukraine since 2012, Interfax-Ukraine reports. Andrei Babko, who has been the Russian trade representative to Armenia since 2013, will now be the Kremlin’s trade envoy to Ukraine instead. The position has been vacant since February 2012, when the former envoy, Sergei Ivanov, retired. Trade relations between Ukraine and Russia have worsened markedly since 2014, when Moscow seized Crimea and launched its war in the Donbas. Ukrainian trade also made a significant pivot in the direction of the EU.
Russia will build a new $1.5-billion road to illegally occupied Crimea, Russia’s state-owned road agency has stated. Rosavtodor has announced a tender for the design and construction of the first section of a new highway from Russia’s Krasnodar region to its Kerch Strait Bridge, which connects Russia to the peninsula, which Kremlin forces illegally seized from Ukraine in 2014. It has been under military occupation since.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has asked ministers to import less coal, electricity. He instructed officials, including Energy Minister Oleksiy Orzhel, to reduce the imports, or at least balance a “deficit” in the energy import-export market. “What kind of import can we talk about when the countries from which we import do not allow us to enter their markets?” Zelensky said, Interfax-Ukraine reported. Zelensky said, “Our coal, our miners, our electricity come first.” The president also pledged to pay off salary debts to unpaid coal miners and have officials conduct audits at coal mining firms.
Zelensky also supported the privatization of the state-owned, coal-powered energy generator Centrenergo. However, he suggested including non-profitable coal mines in the deal too. “I think this is a great idea,” he said during a meeting of coal workers in Kyiv. The comment appeared to be directed at Maksym Tymchenko, the head of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest energy company, which is owned by Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov. DTEK is interested in buying Centrenergo.
The CEO of DTEK was then offered the chance to participate in the privatization of unprofitable mines. Tymchenko suggested this could be problematic and predicted challenges in obtaining necessary approval from the Ukrainian Anti-Monopoly Committee. DTEK is already the largest combined energy holding in the country and is criticized for its monopolistic approach to the energy sector, as well as its alleged manipulation of energy prices.
But DTEK has no interest in more coal mines, Tymchenko told the Kyiv Post after the meeting, which Zelensky ended with an official order to find strong players who are ready to invest in state coal mine modernization. DTEK has no plans to participate in the privatization of Centrenergo and state mines, its CEO said.
Tymchenko claims that Ukraine’s energy sector needs $90 billion in investment and that there’s plenty of room in the market for new players to compete with DTEK, or to invest in joint ventures with them. That’s what the CEO said in a recent interview with the Kyiv Post.
Belarus expects to start pumping imported oil through Ukraine via the Odesa-Brody pipeline in March, Belarusian officials have said, according to Censor.net. The pipeline infrastructure through Ukraine will be used as the most economical, fast and reliable transportation method, government officials decided. In January, President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko announced plans to limit oil supplies from the Russian market to 30-40% of demand by establishing alternative deliveries through the Baltic countries and Ukraine. In 2019, Moscow and Minsk failed to agree on terms for the supply of Russian oil to Belarus.
The Ukrainian government plans an international audit of its Pension Fund in 2020, Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk has said. “We are planning to hire a professional auditor for… the Pension Fund in order to check what’s going on there in terms of expenses. We will look very attentively… so as to find an answer to the question of how we could save them through cutting administration costs,” Honcharuk said, Interfax-Ukraine reported.
Ukrzaliznytsia has started installing charging stations for electric cars at its railway stations, the firm has stated. At the central Kyiv railway station, the first two charging stations for electric vehicles were unveiled on Feb. 25. Four cars can be charged simultaneously. Such equipment is planned to be installed at other stations in the country.
