Ukraine Urges Gas-Rich Qatar to Boost Europe Energy Supplies

(Bloomberg) --

Ukraine’s president called on gas-rich Qatar and others to boost their energy exports to Europe in order to reduce the continent’s reliance on Russian hydrocarbons.

“Responsible states like the state of Qatar are reliable and solid exporters of natural resources, and they can make their contribution to the stabilization in Europe,” President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told the Doha Forum in Qatar’s capital on Saturday via a video address.

“The future of Europe rests with your efforts,” he said. “I ask you to increase the output of energy to ensure that everyone in Russia understands that no country can use energy as a weapon to blackmail the world.”

Russia supplies about 40% of the European Union’s gas consumption, and the bloc has raced to find alternatives following the invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. and EU on Friday unveiled an agreement to boost shipments of liquefied natural gas to the continent. The U.S. recently supplanted Qatar’s status as the world’s top supplier of LNG. 

Europe has sought to diversify with pipelines from North Africa and the construction of LNG import facilities. Newly added shipments from U.S. and Middle Eastern producers may pose challenges for European climate goals and take time to implement.

Qatar won’t divert LNG away from long-term buyers in Europe, Energy Minister Saad Al Kaabi said. The country has the option to send as much as 15% of its cargoes away from buyers on the continent if it can find a better price elsewhere, but it won’t do this as a result of the war in Ukraine, he added. 

Regional Concerns

Regional leaders speaking at the two-day forum expressed their concern that conflict in the Middle East hasn’t received the world’s attention as Ukraine has.

“The humanitarian suffering that we have seen in Ukraine -- and everyone is talking about it right now -- has been the suffering of countries in this region for years and nothing happened actually,” said Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, Qatar’s deputy prime minister, said to much applause. 

After speaker Josep Borrell, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs, remarked that the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol was “Europe’s Aleppo” -- a reference to devastation in Syria’s civil war -- Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister followed with a rebuke.

“Aleppo was our Aleppo,” said the minister, fellow panelist Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, also to applause. “The engagement of the global community and the engagement of the powers that could be effective now and then is quite different.”

Others, including Qatari leader Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh, said more international attention should be focused on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. 

“Palestinians are really angry that international law applies to some parts of the world and it does not apply to a 74-years old issue, which is the question of Palestine,” Shtayyeh said on the sidelines of the conference. “This is something that we hope to see, and the Ukraine crisis is bringing Palestine closer to a solution rather than pushing the cause of Palestine back.”

Qatar’s regional neighbors, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, took the historic step of normalizing relations with Israel in 2020.

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