Gazprom willing to ship more gas to Poland

WARSAW, Poland, March 13 (UPI) -- Gazprom is ready to supply Poland with additional natural gas provided there are no third parties included in the transits, Russian officials said Friday.

"If Poland is ready to sign such an arrangement, Gazprom will deliver the gas," Russian Transport Minister Igor Levitin told Itar-Tass.

The report said such an agreement would require amendments to a 1993 agreement between the two countries.

Poland has suffered from intermittent gas supplies since a January dispute between Ukraine and Moscow disrupted the European gas market.

Warsaw said it feared Moscow was trying to assert its political influence in the Eastern European gas sector by pressuring Poland to move away from the European-backed Yamal-Europe gas pipeline.

Poland and Belarus in February moved for the construction of a second leg of the Yamal-Europe pipeline in the wake of the Ukrainian gas row.

Yamal-Europe 2 would connect gas fields in western Siberia to European customers through Belarus and Poland, sidelining conventional routes through Ukraine.

Polish national energy company PGNiG, however, said it had hoped to import additional gas in order to secure more shipments by April.