The gas transit contract between Russia and Ukraine will expire at the end of this year, while the oil transportation contract will expire on January 1, 2030. Both agreements were signed by Russia and Ukraine in 2019.
Kiev has announced that it will not renew the gas transportation contract, asking Europe to find an alternative to Russian gas, but has not yet declared its intention to transship Russian oil.
Kiev Post points out that giving up revenue from transporting both Russian oil and gas will not be a big loss for Ukraine.
Annual profits from the transportation of Russian oil and Russian gas are estimated at 10 billion hryvnia ($250 million) - very small compared to the estimated 2024 Ukrainian state budget revenue of about 1.78 trillion hryvnia ($43.7 billion) and spent about 3.35 trillion hryvnia ($82.3 billion).
In general, the annual profit from the transit of Russian oil and gas equals the income that Ukraine gets from selling bonds in a few weeks.
On July 17, Ukraine banned Lukoil from using the Druzhba oil pipeline to transport oil to the Slovnaft oil refinery in Slovakia owned by Hungarian company MOL.
Over the next two weeks, Slovakia and Hungary repeatedly spoke out publicly on the issue, asking the European Commission to intervene.
ExPro oil analyst Mykhailo Svyshcho told Kiev Post that, in fact, Ukraine did not stop shipping Russian oil, even increasing oil shipments by 30% between June and July. Here This is the first increase in the amount of Russian oil transported through Ukraine since the beginning of 2024.
Ukraine also only imposed sanctions on Lukoil's oil shipped to Hungary and Slovakia, emphasizing that the country had the right to stop shipping Russian oil but in fact did not stop shipping, analysts pointed out.
It is possible that oil from Lukoil is still flowing through the Ukrainian pipeline because there is no data on which company is transporting the oil. In addition, Russian companies can swap oil with each other and export it, using the name of another enterprise.
"Ukraine cooperates with Russia 's Transneft . Transneft does not provide data on which companies export oil using Ukrainian pipelines, but only provides export volumes" - Mr. Svyshcho shared.
This is also what happened on the northern section of the Druzhba oil pipeline through Belarus, Poland and Germany: Russian oil was swapped with Kazakh oil and shipped to these countries.
Kiev Post points out that the order to block Russian oil that Ukraine implemented only affects Lukoil - Russia's largest private oil company. Meanwhile, there are many other major players in the Russian oil market including Rosneft, Tatneft, Gaspromneft, Transneft.
The author of the article said he questioned why Lukoil was the only company banned from transshipping oil through Ukraine's oil pipeline. However, the Office of the President of Ukraine, Ukraine's intelligence agencies and the energy committee of the country's parliament refused to comment or did not respond.
"It's better to ask those who made this decision," deputy parliamentarian and head of the energy committee of the Ukrainian parliament Andrii Herus told the Kiev Post.
