Serbia asks ally Russia for much-needed heating gas

More factories close as impact of Moscow-Kiev row intensifies

A man lies on a mattress in a homeless shelter in Belgrade yesterday. The shelter is the only one in Belgrade that is state-run and its resources are stretched to the limit this winter as temperatures sink below zero degrees Celsius (32 Fahrenheit).

By David Vujanovic - Agence France-Presse

BELGRADE – Belgrade appealed to its old ally Russia yesterday to provide emergency heating gas as supplies run out in many parts of Serbia, which has been hit by a bitter cold front made worse by heavy snowfall.

“Serbia has asked Russia to deliver certain quantities (of gas) through Belarus,” Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic was quoted as saying on B92 Television.

The former Yugoslav republic, seen as a client state of its powerful ally Russia, expected Moscow to reply later in the day, according to the report, which did not elaborate on the alternative route. The move came as people in the northern province of Vojvodina, the region most reliant on Russian gas piped through Ukraine and Hungary, faced freezing conditions as they returned to work a day after the Orthodox Christmas holiday.

Elsewhere in the Balkans, the region hardest hit by the crisis as it entered a third day, tens of thousands of homes were left without heating and several factories were forced to remain closed in Bosnia and Bulgaria.

Authorities were to meet in Sarajevo amid fears Bosnia’s alternative energy sources would dry up entirely within seven days.

Serbia has switched 90 percent of its heating plants to crude oil after Russian gas deliveries were completely halted at midnight on Tuesday. However nine towns and cities, mostly in Vojvodina, are unable to make the changeover from gas, leaving the locations with an estimated 900,000 inhabitants without regular heating.

In Vojvodina, some factories stopped production after gas supplies finally ran out, making conditions too harsh for workers.

“We had to let our employees go home because it’s cold and it is impossible for them to work under these conditions,” said Boris Milic of the Insert shoe factory, which employs 130 people in Sremska Mitrovica. “We are trying to find an alternative means of heating,” he told AFP on the telephone from the northwestern town.

Analysts said the crisis would prove a test of Serbs’ patience with their “brothers” in Russia, which cut off natural gas deliveries to Ukraine on New Year’s Day over a price dispute. “Ukraine... has reserves of 22 million cubic meters, enough for three months of consumption, and other European countries have similiar reserves,” journalist Dimitrije Boarov said in a newspaper column published yesterday. “It turns out that by threatening Europe through this dispute with Ukraine, Russia is in fact punishing mostly Bulgaria and Serbia, which are its main traditional (allies) in the Balkans,” Boarov wrote for the daily Danas. “This gas shock that Serbia is going through is putting to the test its whole strategy of leaning on Russia,” he said.

Serbia’s leadership has already come in for heavy criticism from factions of the government over a December energy deal they consider too favorable for the Russian side. Serbian President Boris Tadic has sought to allay such fears about the latest crisis. “Serbia is a collateral victim in all of this, like many other countries,” Tadic told the daily Blic.