For the first five days of this week, Ukraine siphoned off nearly 400 million cubic meters of gas. This is a very large volume, which is comparable to our supplies for Germany for three days.

However, we will not put Ukrainian people into a difficult situation.

In this situation, which is the fault of the Ukrainian side, we have been forced to start reducing pressure in the pipeline to Ukraine.

If there is no contract, gas delivery to Ukraine's users will be stopped at 10 o'clock in the morning on January 1.

The official response has been received: Ukraine has turned down our offer.

All our contracts are being carried out in full.

On Dec. 31, we got a document from Turkmenistan saying that in line with our contract for January, they are shipping 141.7 million cubic meters per day. This volume is the maximum pipelines from Turkmenistan can carry. We were not aware of any gas going to Ukraine. That would have been impossible.

We understand that it is cold, but it is not only cold in Ukraine. We are currently providing more gas for all our consumers, both in Russia and abroad, and we do not plan to put up with the fact that gas destined for European consumers is being used in Ukraine and is not even reaching the border. Nobody gave Ukraine the right to take more gas than the contracted volume.

But our proposals were turned down, which means that the Ukrainian authorities were tuned to confrontational moods from the very start.

The position expressed by the European Commission today was just the position we were responding to on Tuesday.