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Country has potential to move from stagnation to growth: CEO

Ukraine PM Shmyhal says government committed to support

Ukraine produced 20.7 Bcm of gas in 2019

London Ukraine's state-owned Naftogaz wants the government to be "proactive" in its support for the country's domestic gas sector in order to provide the right conditions for output to grow, its CEO Andriy Kobolev said Sept. 8.

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Ukraine, whose gas production has been steady at some 20 Bcm/year for the past 25 years, has vast untapped potential in its onshore blocks -- both for conventional and unconventional resources -- as well as in the Black Sea.

Large swathes of acreage have been opened up in the past year for new exploration but there have been delays in signing off on new production sharing agreements and gas producers believe there should be more incentives afforded to the industry to boost upstream activity.

"Ukraine has the potential to move from stagnation to production growth," Kobolev said at a meeting with government officials in Kyiv.

"But new areas and projects that can provide such a result carry significant risks, require significant investment, new technologies and expertise," he said, according to comments posted to the Naftogaz website.

"We are ready to take responsibility, explore and open these opportunities for the entire industry and for the country. But their successful implementation requires a proactive position on the part of the state," he said.

Ukraine has long harbored the ambition of being self-sufficient in gas -- and even to become an exporter -- and its Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said at the meeting that domestic gas output would bring about Ukraine's energy independence.

The country produced 20.7 Bcm of gas in 2019, almost enough to meet its consumption of 26.4 Bcm.

"At meetings with the President [Volodymyr Zelensky], we have constantly raised the issue of increasing our own production," Shmyhal said.

"It is necessary to conduct appropriate exploration phase, complete the already partially implemented exploration plans and promptly begin production. For its part, the government is exerting every effort to do such work, and we are also counting on the relevant legislative initiatives of the lawmakers," he said.

"I am confident that together we will be able to complete the necessary work and shortly strengthen Ukraine's energy independence."

Naftogaz said it stood ready to implement pilot projects in new areas of production, reducing the risk of such developments for the whole industry.

These could include the development of deep horizons, deposits of unconventional shale gas and the Black Sea shelf, it said.

"The industry also needs decisions from the state -- signing production sharing agreements after tenders that were held more than a year ago, introducing incentives for unconventional gas production, and opening access to subsoil users to the Black Sea."

Ukraine has also opened up the downstream gas market with Naftogaz now able to sell gas directly to households and businesses, rather than through third parties which used to be the case.

It is offering a number of different tariffs for customers, including annual, quarterly and monthly tariffs for business.

Its annual tariff, which it said is best suited for gas suppliers, is indexed to the German NCG hub, Naftogaz said, while its quarterly and monthly tariffs are priced off the country's energy exchange.

"Naftogaz is ready to supply gas to all market participants in Ukraine," its commerce director Willem Koppuls said.

"To do this, we have prepared proposals of various volumes, linked to both European hubs and the Ukrainian exchange," Koppuls said.

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Ukraine's Naftogaz urges state to be 'proactive' in helping boost gas output - S&P Global

The House Intelligence Committee's ranking member, Rep. Devin NunesDevin Gerald NunesNunes declines to answer if he received information from Ukraine lawmaker meant to damage Biden White House, Congress talk next coronavirus relief bill as COVID-19 continues to surge Tucker Carlson: 'Matt Drudge is now firmly a man of the progressive left' MORE (R-Calif.) on Wednesday declined to answer whether he had received materials from Ukrainian sources meant to damage former Vice President Joe BidenJoe BidenHillicon Valley: Three arrested in Twitter hack | Trump pushes to break up TikTok | House approves 0M for election security Wisconsin Republicans raise questions about death of Black Trump supporter Trump holds mini-rally at Florida airport MORE's (D) reputation ahead of the 2020 election.

Nunes was questioned repeatedly in a closed-door committee meeting Wednesday by Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.) about materials that were allegedly sent to GOP members of Congress, including the California representative, by Ukrainian lawmaker AndriiDerkach.

Derkach has worked with President TrumpDonald John TrumpTrump says he will ban TikTok from operating in the US Trump's 2019 financial disclosure reveals revenue at Mar-a-Lago, other major clubs Treasury to conduct policy review of tax-exempt status for universities after Trump tweets MORE's personal lawyer, Rudy GiulianiRudy GiulianiNunes declines to answer if he received information from Ukraine lawmaker meant to damage Biden Democratic attorneys criticize House Judiciary Democrats' questioning of Barr Swalwell: Barr has taken Michael Cohen's job as Trump's fixer MORE.

Giuliani has ties to Ukraine, and last year boasted publicly of a trip to the country for the purpose of investigating Biden's past.

"I guess I would request an explanation from the ranking member why he is just not prepared to respond to a simple question whether he has received materials that have been called into question that seem designed to denigrate a former vice president of the United States, but, at a minimum, to share them with the rest of the committee," Maloney said during the closed-door hearing, according to a transcript released by the committee Thursday.

The questioning came during a part of the meeting Wednesday when the committee voted along party lines to allow all members of the lower chamber to view intelligence that Democrats sent to the FBI warning the agency that about a campaign to discredit the former vice president, according to a report from CNN.

Maloney went on to tell Rep. Adam SchiffAdam Bennett SchiffDemocrats exit briefing saying they fear elections under foreign threat Nunes declines to answer if he received information from Ukraine lawmaker meant to damage Biden Hillicon Valley: House panel grills tech CEOs during much anticipated antitrust hearing | TikTok to make code public as it pushes back against 'misinformation' | House Intel panel expands access to foreign disinformation evidence MORE (D-Calif.), chairman of the Intelligence Committee, that there are public reports that congressional Republicans have received materials from the Ukrainian lawmaker, and that they "would not be prohibited from disclosure."

"But, at a minimum, I also understand that majority staff has requested of the minority that they be shared with majority staff so that we might evaluate them independently," Maloney continued.

The New York congressman added that his inquiry to Nunes is whether he is "prepared to disclose to the committee whether he has received materials that have been called into question in the public reports from Andrii Derkach and, if so, whether he is prepared to share them with the rest of the committee," according to CNN.

Schiff then asked Nunes if he would like to respond to Maloney, to which Nunes replied, "No."

Maloney again pressed Nunes, asking him if he would say whether he received the materials.

"Is the ranking member prepared to even respond to the question? How about it, Mr. Nunes? Did you receive a package from Andrii Derkach or not? And would you share with the committee or not?" Maloneycontinued.

According to the transcript, Nunes did not answer.

"Well, I guess this is a case where silence speaks volumes."

The meeting was then adjourned by Schiff following the exchange.

The Trump campaign and the president's allies have repeatedly pushed an unfounded claim that the former vice president used the power of his office to help his son Hunter Biden who, at the time, served on the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.

Text messages released earlier this year revealed communication between a member of Nunes's staff and Lev Parnas, a close Ukrainian associate of Giuliani's who was arrested for campaign finance violations, about meetings with Ukrainian prosecutors to get information about Biden, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The Hill has reached out to Nunes's office for comment.

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Nunes declines to answer if he received information from Ukraine lawmaker meant to damage Biden | TheHill - The Hill

Yuriy Didovets, a lawyer who lives in Kyiv, was part of the crowd that toppled a statue of Lenin in the city on December 8, 2013. Several weeks earlier, mass protests had broken out in response to the governments decision to postpone signing an association agreement with the European Union. These were the early days of the EuroMaidan movement.

Didovets, who was part of the protest movement, took Lenins head as a souvenir. The piece of red quartzite rock now sits in his office. Another protester, Ihor Miroshnychenko, a member of the nationalist party Svoboda, who organized the toppling of the Lenin statue, took home a hand.

For me, it was a symbolic moment, said Miroshnychenko. I understood that after the fall of Lenin, the Yanukovych regime would fall too. At that moment, Yanukovych lost control over the streets. Police were there, but they let us do it.

The motivation behind the Leninopad or Lenin fall that followed, where thousands of statues across the country were removed from public spaces, is comparable to the anger that is propelling Western activists to call for statues of controversial public figures to be taken off their plinths.

Often, society ignores the ambivalent biography of a historical figure, concentrating on positive sides of his heritage up to a certain moment, said Andreas Umland, a senior expert of the Ukrainian Institute of Future.

At some point, that exercise in selective memory breaks down because standards shift, he said. That doesnt erase the fact that they contributed a lot to the development of society, he stressed, but that social and political tides have turned.

* * *

In Ukraine, statues of communist leaders had a clear political purpose: They were reminders of a shared Soviet history, which Russia continued to use to wield influence and preserve its dominance over its former satellite state well after independence.

When Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and started to fuel violent pro-Russian uprisings in eastern Ukraine, these symbols of Russian power became stark reminders of Ukraines ongoing struggle for sovereignty.

In 2015, the Ukrainian government adopted legislation that formally equated the Soviet regime with Germanys wartime Nazi regime, and ordered all symbols of both ideologies to be removed from streets across the country. According to the Ukrainian National Remembrance Institute, some 2,400 communist monuments were taken down between 2015 and 2020.

The move didnt go down well among some members of the older generation, which maintains the Soviet regime did good and carries nostalgia for its leaders.

This is just brutal, said Tamara Malyzheva, 74, a retiree from Kyiv. Whether you support that ideology or not, Kyiv was a stable place to live during USSR, and we must remember those days, not surrender them to the Western Ukraine that always hated communists.

When men first started to hammer at the Lenin statue in Kyiv in 2013, they were interrupted by an old man who approached the statue and hugged it, Sbastian Gobert, a French journalist who was there to cover the protests, recalled.

He was crying, he begged the demonstrators to stop. It was obvious at that moment that Leninopad was not a consensual topic, he said in an interview over email.

Statues became a question of identity and political allegiance as well, said Gobert. There are hardly any monuments to Lenin left in western Ukraine, but the ex-Soviet leader still stands proudly on his plinths in Crimea and in the self-declared republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Despite resistance among some pockets of the population, the removal of communist markers has been a success, according to Bohdan Korolenko, a historian at the Ukrainian National Remembrance Institute, because some 95 percent of symbols of the totalitarian regime were removed from public display.

"The main task of decommunization is not to take down a statue or rename a street, it is to change the identity of Ukrainians" and prevent similar ideology from taking root again, he said. Ukrainians, he added, "need to understand communism was a suppressive regime. Unfortunately, many Ukrainians still have not learned that lesson.

At some point government lost control over the process, Korolenko admitted. There were simply too many statues for the process to be completely regulated.

Many people did not wait for an answer to come from the government to make up their own minds, said Gobert. In 2017, the French journalist published the book Looking for Lenin, about his search, along with Swiss photographer Niels Ackermann, for Ukraines missing Soviet statues.

The two found that while some monuments had been destroyed, others had been transformed or repurposed. People went their own way to replace Lenin with religious figures, with flowers, with fountains, with [representations of] Cossacks or with nothing, he said.

Just as there is no single interpretation of the past, there is no single way to deal with its physical relics, according to Gobert. No one answer was found.

Some statues ended up in private collections; others are still collecting dust in local authorities basements.

The most fortunate ones have found a new home as part of the exhibit USSRic Park, which opened in 2019 in a corner of a national park near the town of Putyvl, in northeastern Ukraine, where visitors can walk among some 100 marble and quartzite statues standing in the shade of the local forest's trees.

We took the idea from Hungary and Lithuania, said Serhiy Tupyk, the parks director, referring to historical parks set up in the 1990s dedicated to relics of totalitarian regimes.

Before opening the park, Tupyk and his team spent four years collecting communist statues from across the country, including monuments to Joseph Stalin, Lenin, Soviet workers, Red Army commanders and many others. We have the full pantheon of Soviet gods, Tupyk joked.

To Tupyk, the destruction of monuments to a troubled past represents a loss and a missed opportunity.

It is our history, he said. In museums, those monuments can no longer agitate for their ideology. Instead, he said, Curators can present them in a full historical context.

Veronika Melkozerova is a freelance journalist based in Ukraine.

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What the West can learn from Ukraine's treatment of Soviet monuments - Politico

Summary

The SMM recorded nine ceasefire violations in Donetsk region (compared with one during the previous reporting period) and 93 ceasefire violations in Luhansk region (compared with none during the previous reporting period).

From 00:01 on 27 July until the end of the reporting period, the SMM recorded a total of 225 ceasefire violations.

The SMM corroborated reports of a man injured due to shrapnel on 27 July in government-controlled Marinka, Donetsk region.

The Mission continued monitoring the disengagement areas near Stanytsia Luhanska, Zolote and Petrivske. Inside the latter two areas, an SMM long-range unmanned aerial vehicle observed people during evening and night hours.

The SMM observed weapons in violation of withdrawal lines on both sides of the contact line.

The Mission facilitated and monitored adherence to localised ceasefires to enable repairs to as well as maintenance and operation of critical civilian infrastructure.

The SMM continued following up on the situation of civilians amid the COVID-19 outbreak, including at entry-exit checkpoints and corresponding checkpoints in Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

The Missions freedom of movement continued to be restricted, including at a checkpoint near non-government-controlled Olenivka.*

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OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine (SMM) Daily Report 182/2020 issued on 1 August 2020 - Ukraine - ReliefWeb

"The establishment of the memorial is extremely important for our country. Its history contains a lot of tragic pages. But we must bear them in mind and tell the coming generations about them. Such moments should stay in the history of Ukraine. They are in our talks, in our memory, in books. It would be very good if this project were brought into life and we built history together with you."

President Zelensky also emphasized the importance of remembering the Ukrainian "Righteous Among the Nations," who saved Jews in the Holocaust.

In a significant development, the meeting participants agreed to form a working committee, headed by Andrii Yermak, Head of the Presidential Administration. The committee will coordinate regarding the framework of the Memorial's establishment as well as to prepare for the 80th anniversary of the Babyn Yar tragedy.

Supervisory Board member, President of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald Lauder, stressed that the future memorial must give visitors a clear answer to the question of what is anti-Semitism and draw the world's attention to Babyn Yar.

Ronald Laudersaid, "This is the third generation that knows about the Holocaust. But while almost everybody knows about Auschwitz, the history of Babyn Yar is almost unknown to young people. I want people to visit Kyiv in order to see the Babyn Yar Memorial, to understand what happened here. We have a chance now to do something fantastic. The more people that know what happened at Babyn Yar, the better off the world will be."

The Head of the Supervisory Board, Natan Sharansky pointed out that the history of Babyn Yar is not only of importance for Jewish people, as it is also the site where other nationalities perished, in particular, Ukrainian, Belarus, and Polish people.

Natan Sharanskysaid, "This initiative is not just a monument, but a critical memorial, with a museum, a research center, contributing to raising the degree of tolerance in society, playing a global role in Ukraine's positioning in the world. Such institutions throughout the world are established in partnership with the state and supported by its key officials."

The first President of Ukraine (1991-1994) Leonid Kravchuk, who has also joined the Supervisory Board, emphasized that the future Memorial will make an indisputable historical statement. "This Project is interesting, important, and highly comprehensive. It is part of history. Babyn Yar is a terrible tragedy and that's why we have to create an unrivalled memory of it, to make the best project possible."

Another Supervisory Board member, former-Minister of Foreign Affairs and Vice-Chancellor of Germany (1998-2005) Joschka Fischer, said "For my country, it's very important not to forget and to contribute everything that we can towards memory of the Holocaust and this terrible crime."

In September 1941, just days after the Nazis occupied Kyiv, around 34,000 of the city's Jews were marched to the Babyn Yar ravine and shot dead over a two-day period. Later massacres were also carried out at the same site, killing victims of other minorities and nationalities.

The Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center will respectfully commemorate the victims of the tragedy and promote the humanization of mankind through preserving memory and study of the history of the Holocaust.

About the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center

The Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Centre is a non-governmental charity whose purpose is to preserve and cultivate the memory of the Holocaust and the Babyn Yar tragedy in Ukraine by turning the Babyn Yar area into a place of remembrance. The Foundation's mission is to worthily honour the memory of the victims of the tragedy and to contribute to the humanization of society through preserving and studying the history of the Holocaust.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1222366/President_Ukraine_Volodymyr_Zelensky.jpg

SOURCE Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center

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Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky Supports Construction of Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial; Working Committee to be Headed by Andrii Yermak, Head of...