UZHGOROD, Ukraine — Keeping Ukraine warm keeps Andriy Kobolev up at night.
Mr. Kobolev, the head of Ukraine’s state energy company, Naftogaz, is scrambling to keep gas flowing into his country as winter looms. Russia’s energy giant, Gazprom, had provided a little more than half of Ukraine’s total gas supply, but suspended its shipments in June in the face of fighting in eastern Ukraine between Russian separatists and the Ukrainian military, citing a price dispute. Europe — itself dependent on Russia but also expanding sanctions on the country — has not been able to fill the gap.
That means Ukraine will have to cut its energy use sharply or risk running dry, which could lead to more civilian deaths when the weather turns cold, and could further batter the country’s economy.
“The situation is very difficult,” Mr. Kobolev said in a recent interview. “Since we have no choice, no other solution, we’ll find a solution and have to live with the amount of gas we will have.”
He spoke at a hotel in this city near Slovakia, just a few hours after he took part in a news conference on the other side of the border. The Slovak and Ukrainian prime ministers had held a ceremonial “switching on” of a gas pipeline that will allow the Slovaks to provide some capacity to Ukraine, but far less than the Ukrainians wanted.
Afterward, Mr. Kobolev and other company officials got in a line of three black cars — a BMW and two Hyundais — and drove a winding path through tiny border villages, zipping past a field with brown spotted cows, a shirtless man in red shorts holding a hedge trimmer, a group of boys hanging from a tree, an elderly woman wearing a kerchief.
While it was hard for an outsider to tell the two sides of the border apart, they are hardly in lock step. Mr. Kobolev and other Ukrainian officials had hoped for the so-called big reverse. In that situation, Slovakia would have been able to reverse the flow of 30 billion cubic meters or 1.06 trillion cubic feet of Russian gas annually and solve Ukraine’s looming energy crisis.
But many saw the big reverse as, no pun intended, a pipe dream. While European Union rules bar territorial restrictions when gas is resold, and Ukraine has signed an association agreement, Gazprom objects to having its gas redirected without its approval. European regulators are in the midst of an antitrust investigation of Gazprom that is examining this issue.
Slovakia, a major thoroughfare for Russian gas heading to Italy and other points west, balked at the idea of a big reverse. Like Ukraine and much of Europe, Slovakia depends on Russia’s natural gas, so the Slovaks have been treading carefully, seeking to appease both the Russians and fellow members of the European Union.
What happens if Russia’s gas stays off?
That is the challenge facing Mr. Kobolev. At 36, he looks like a boyish junior executive, and he has been on the job only a few months, but he is resolved not to be rolled over by Gazprom.
Like many Ukrainians, his mind is preoccupied with the toll of his country’s war and anger at how it has come about. Books are one of his refuges.
“I just finished García Márquez, ‘One Hundred Years of Loneliness,’ ” he said, referring to “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez. “Crazy book, rocked my mind.”
He was once a lower-level executive at Naftogaz, but quit in 2010 in disgust at the government of the Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. After the revolution in February that ousted Mr. Yanukovych, Mr. Kobolev returned to the company in the top role.
“I couldn’t work with the Yanukovych team, because they are corrupt guys,” he said, adding that the Naftogaz of that era never seemed to push back on the price demands of Gazprom. “Maybe they were just altruists, I don’t know.”
Now negotiations between the two companies are less cordial, and they no longer take place in Moscow, as they once always did, or in Ukraine for that matter.
“We don’t want to go to Moscow. They don’t want to go to Kiev,” Mr. Kobolev said.
