Gazprom said on Friday it had recently halved Russia's natural gas shipments to Europe through Ukraine as part of efforts to reduce deliveries through the troublesome transit nation. The Russian monopoly said it had cut back its deliveries across the former Soviet republic by 47 percent from earlier volumes and denied Ukrainian claims that the drop was dictated by falling demand in Europe.
"This is only the beginning," Gazprom spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov said in a statement. "We are at the start of a long journey aimed at diverting gas transit from Ukraine to our (Belarus) subsidiary Beltransgaz and our new subsea pipelines," the Gazprom spokesman said. The deputy head of Ukraine's oil firm Naftogaz had earlier said that daily shipments through his company's transport network had dropped to 180-200 million cubic metres of gas from 400 million cubic metres earlier in the week.
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