EU leent geld aan Oekraïne ter voorkoming van gascrisis (en)

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The European Commission has helped Ukraine to secure international loans to prevent a repetition of last winter's gas cut-off.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the European Investment Bank and the World Bank will together put forward $1.7 billion (€1.2 billion).

Three hundred million dollars is to help Ukraine buy Russian gas to fill storage tanks for the coming winter. The rest is to pay for reforms to its distribution network over the next 18 months.

The deal is conditional on Ukraine increasing transparency in its state-owned gas distributor Naftogaz, reducing gas waste and bumping up household energy prices to market levels.

"I believe this agreement should help Ukraine become a more reliable energy partner for the benefit of both the European Union and Ukraine's own people," European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso said in a statement on Friday (31 July).

Russia in January cut off Ukraine's gas in a row over payments, creating massive outages in the EU which gets 20 percent of its gas imports via the country.

The rescue package follows a plea by Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin to Mr Barroso to help find money, with Russian gas supplier Gazprom ill-equipped to face another gas crisis.

Any Naftogaz reforms or domestic price hikes could harm Ukraine prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko's bid to be elected as president in January.

Naftogaz has in recent years been linked to top-level political corruption cases and is notoriously badly run. The company collected less than half of its bills from industrial clients in the first six months of 2009.

The $1.7 billion gas package is to come on top of $16.4 billion of general economic aid from the International Monetary Fund.