QUORA: Ukraine found huge proven reserves of natural gas after the Soviet Union broke up. Does Putin want them?
Answered by Doha, Updated Jun 30
Yes Putin wants them. Why does he want them despite having one of the largest natural gas reserves? He wants them because if Ukraine gets their hands on them, the results are gonna be catastrophic for Russia.

BTW, Putin already took most of them. The gas reserve was one of the biggest reason why Putin annexed Crimea and started the pro Russian separatist movement in Donbass.

Ukraine found 1.1 trillion cubic meters of proven gas reserves. its total gas reserves would have been estimated upto 5.4 trillion cubic meters.

80% of those were located in Off-shore Crimea, Sea of Azov, the western Carpathians, and the Dnieper Donitz rift in the East. Which means during that time, Ukraine had the 3rd largest proven natural gas reserve in Europe behind Russia and Norway.

With that Natural gas reserves, the EU and rest of Europe could of replaced most of Russian gas with Ukrainian Gas. If that happened, then russia could of lost tens , if not hundreds of billions of dollar and its largest gas market.

There was a problem for Ukraine though. At that time, Ukraine didn't had the technology or the equipment to go after any of those reserves. And the president of Ukraine at that time was pro Russian. So putin didn't need to worry about the gas reserves.

Later in 2013, Ukraine signed a deal with western companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron..etc to explore the oilfields near the Carpathians and Dnieper Donitz rift in the east. But then In February of 2014, Ukraines pro Russian regime were overthrown
and replaced with more of a pro western president.

And then Putin made some bogus claim about Ukraine killing Russian speaking people in Crimea and Donbass. Russia then fully annexed Crimea taking a significant portion of Ukraine’s proven natural gas. Pro Russian separatist in the donbass region
occupies the areas near Yuziska oil field in the east which made Shell abandon its $10 billion project in the region.

By the end of 2014, all of the western oil companies abandoned their projects. As a result, Russia remained the largest exporter of Natural gas in Europe's market.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)