Juggling With Facts

It seems that Washington Post simple cannot write anything about Russia without juggling with a fact or two. In the article “Russia and Ukraine Reach Deal on Gas Peter Finn writes:

An uproar in Europe about dwindling gas supplies in the dead of winter, and pointed questions from European leaders about Russia's reliability as an energy partner, forced Gazprom on Tuesday to restore much of the natural gas it had cut off and restart negotiations with the Ukrainians.

And another passage –

Gazprom insisted it was putting enough gas into the system to meet the needs of Western Europe and accused Ukraine of stealing gas by siphoning it out of the system before it reached the country's western borders. Ukrainian officials denied they stole Russian gas. They also accused Gazprom of miscalculating the effects of its decision to reduce the volume of gas.

It was hardly surprising that Gazprom was ready that it would be accused of "miscalculating".
At every compression station on the Russian-Ukrainian border and at every station on Ukrainian- European border calculations were done by (1) SGS auditors and (2) German Ruhrgas auditors who stated without doubt that somehow 31% of natural gas was “lost” on the territory of Ukraine. On the other side Ukraine categorically refused to let independent expert control the flow and refused to state how much gas they received.
What’s more – yesterday Ukraine agreed that the gas was “lost” on its territory and agreed to pay for it. The fact that Yushchenko denied they stole Russian gas speaks about his inability to control Ukrainian gas oligarchs.

It seems that it was Gazprom that showed its reliability and Ukrainian Naftagas that demonstrated how shamefully it could steal European gas.