REUTERS
Gas reserves in Ukraine's underground storage facilities expanded by 1.6%, or 241 million cubic meters (mcm), to 15.758 billion cubic meters (bcm) from September 26 to October 3, according to PJSC Ukrtransgaz, the operator of Ukraine's gas transportation system.
The average daily volume of gas pumped into the underground storage facilities is about 20 mcm, the company said.
As UNIAN reported earlier, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk earlier announced that Ukraine planned to increase its natural gas reserves to 19 bcm before the beginning of the heating season in the middle of October 2015 to ensure uninterrupted transit shipments of Russian gas to Europe.
Ukraine suspended purchases of Russian gas on July 1 after fruitless talks in Vienna.
During recent talks in Brussels on September 25, Ukraine, Russia, and the European Commission initialed a binding gas protocol, which together with an addendum to the existing gas contract between Russia's OAO Gazprom and NJSC Naftogaz of Ukraine, form a new Winter Package.
According to the initialed protocol, the Ukrainian side commits to securing natural gas transit through its territory to the EU, including via injecting 2 billion cubic meters of natural gas into underground storage still in October 2015.
The Russian government in turn commits to lowering the gas price to Ukraine, by means of decreasing the export duty, to a competitive level comparable to the neighboring EU countries both in the 4th quarter of 2015 and in the 1st quarter of 2016.