Officials of Uzbekistan and Russia held a number of bilateral meetings and discussed the terms for the natural gas supply. As it became known, the Russian authorities had put forward conditions.
Initially, they offered to supply natural gas of Russian origin in reverse order, through Kazakhstan via the Central Asia-Center (CAC) pipeline.
Russia’s main demand was that Uzbekistan should transfer its gas transmission grid to the ownership of Gazprom at market value. Similar demands were put forward to the national company KazakhGas, which rejected such conditions.
The second condition put forward by Russia was to cede the rights to export gas to China. That is, Gazrom offered to become a party to the agreement instead of the Uzbek company UzGazTrade.
As a result of bilateral negotiations in December, the conditions set by the Russian side were lifted.
According to media reports, a series of additional meetings are planned to assess the technical feasibility of gas supplies. However, a scope of the work requires mobilization of significant amounts of funding. In this regard, the practical possibility of organizing supplies is unlikely.
