City officials in Kyiv on Friday urged residents to stop driving private vehicles to save Ukraine’s limited fuel reserves for troops fighting the Russian invasion, in a statement that reflected uncertainty over energy stability and stability. the rest of Europe. The city administration encouraged the movers to use public transport, which is slowly recovering after Russian forces thwarted their attempt to occupy the Ukrainian capital about a month ago. “Remember the needs of the army,” officials told the Telegram. The wartime measures remind us that the global rise in energy prices that followed the Russian invasion on February 24 had very different consequences for Moscow and Kyiv. Two months after the Russian attack, the Ukrainians outside the immediate battlefield are struggling to regain a sense of normalcy. (Kyiv now operates 140 buses, 70 trams and 77 trolleys, according to city data, from about 150 buses and 30 trams on April 5, just days after Russian forces withdrew from the capital suburbs.) By contrast, Russia has earned tens of billions of dollars from oil and gas exports, mainly to European Union countries. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged the shortage of fuel in Ukraine in a speech Friday night. Russia has said it is targeting Ukraine’s fuel facilities, and Zelensky said the blockade of his country’s seaports by the Kremlin had exacerbated the energy crisis. “Queues and rising prices at gas stations are observed in many parts of our country,” he said. Zelensky said his government would set up a “fuel supply system” within two weeks to alleviate the problem, “no matter how difficult”. He did not elaborate, but said that Ukraine should also “get from the European Union all the fuel our citizens need now.” What he meant was not immediately clear. Some of Russia’s energy exports reach EU countries via pipelines that cross Ukrainian territory. The prolongation of the war in Ukraine poses major problems for the world economy The EU faces major energy challenges, with Russia suspending gas shipments to Poland and Bulgaria this week. As the bloc ratifies Moscow for its aggression and seeks to reduce energy purchases from Russia, prices soar. Inflation in the euro area – the 19 countries that use the euro as their currency – rose to 7.5% this month. Energy inflation hovered around 40 percent on an annual basis. The The 27 EU members are still dependent on Russia for energy, with average monthly payments in Moscow for fossil fuel purchases increasing in recent months. EU countries have bought about $ 46 billion worth of oil, gas and coal from Russia since the start of the invasion, or about $ 23 billion a month, according to a report by the Center for Energy and Clean Air Research, a think tank based on Finland. Last year, Russian energy imports from the EU totaled $ 104 billion, averaging just over $ 8.5 billion a month, according to the European Commission. In the two months since he attacked Ukraine, Russia has exported an additional $ 20 billion in fossil fuels to non-EU countries, including South Korea, Japan and Turkey, all of which have condemned the Kremlin invasion. China has bought about $ 7 billion worth of Russian fossil fuels since the start of the war.
