Agreements for Gas Stalled

It’s been a cold weekend here in Bulgaria.  Yesterday temperatures hovered around -12 degrees Celsius.  Not good considering that the country has no heat. Oh, and agreements for gas have been stalled.

As I’ve mentioned, my apartment has been okay because I my heat is electric but for others it’s becoming a serious problem.

I went to my landlord’s house for dinner yesterday.  They have a single space heater that sits on a stool–it’s no bigger than an American coffee pot.  The heater puts out a little heat but it was noticeably cold in the apartment.  It doesn’t help that her apartment is a corner apartment meaning that they don’t share as many walls with neighbors to help insulate the apartment.  They live in a giant block with 14 floors and I can only assume that the other apartments are just as cold. The block has 14 floors and is divided into A and B each half of the block has four apartments on the floor so that’s 112 apartments without heat in a single block.  And the neighborhood that they live in is sprinkled with blocks I would guess that from their apartment window I could see a dozen block buildings just like theirs. If you stop to think about it–that’s a lot of people without heat.

My landlord’s wife, Anne, complained about not having hot water all week and showed me just how little heat was coming out of the radiators.  Normally you couldn’t keep your hand on the radiator because it would be hot to the touch.  Yesterday it was barely warm.  Anne speaks really no English but no matter–I understood was she was saying.  She was angry, really angry, with Russia.  This seems to be the emotion that most older Bulgarians have. 

Then I went and met two twenty-something friends for drinks–a Bulgarian and a Spaniard.  The Spaniard has heat luckily his apartment is heated with electricity.  But my Bulgarian friend said that she’s only heating one room in her family’s large apartment–the living room (her parents now live outside of the city in a home they built with plenty of fireplaces).  The unheated rooms in her apartment are about 14 degrees Celsius.  She jokingly told me that it helps her make her mind up about what to wear each day.  However later in the evening when we returned to the subject about the heat, she said that she’s pulled out a stationery-exercise bike and when she starts to feel cold she hops on the bike for 10 minutes until she’s warm again.

I decided then and there that I would be a really unhappy camper if I lived in an apartment without heat and I think that I would become a heat-refugee and go and live with someone who had a nice warm apartment.

By Friday last week, it looked like Brussels had helped to negotiate an agreement between Russia and Ukraine.  But over the weekend this seems to have fallen apart.  Great.

What appears to have happened is that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s now prime minister, signed an agreement which was then given to Ukraine’s prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko to sign.  She did but according to the NYT she wrote next to her signature “with declaration attached.”  This of course didn’t make Russia happy and their President, Dmitri Madvedev, declared that he would not uphold the agreement.

I guess that this is fair considering it was a sneaky thing for Tymoshenko to do.  NYT writes that the declaration states that “Ukraine had not been guilty of stealing gas from the export pipelines, a statement essentially asking Moscow to backpedal on the allegation that had underpinned its justification for halting shipments to Europe.”  Strange thing to do considering this is what most of the fight is about and I can’t imagine why Russia would ever agree to the declaration.  Clearly it was a power move.

This said, it’s making the prospect of Bulgaria receiving natural gas early this week look less and less possible.  Both the NYT and the BBC report that Tymoshenko has been convinced to separate the declaration from the original agreement but it’s still uncertain when the gas will come back on.  (This is in part due to the fact that experts assume that it will take at least three days for pressure to build up again and for the gas lines to be fully functioning again.)

At this point, we’re waiting.  There’s a scheduled meeting in Brussels this afternoon and there are EU moniters in Ukraine who are also waiting to see if some kind of an agreement can be worked out.  Until then, most of Bulgaria finds itself in the cold but life goes on here–only we’re wearing more layers and drinking more coffee…oh and by the time evening rolls around if a little bit of rakia can’t warm a Bulgarians soul in this cold weather, I am not sure that anything can.