Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) -- Russia offered Uzbekistan to supply natural gas in exchange for transferring the country’s gas transmission system to Gazprom. This was reported by the publication Gazeta.uz, citing sources.

At the end of November 2022, Russia proposed to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to create a triple gas union.

Uzbekistan and Russia discussed this issue during a series of bilateral meetings.

According to the publication, initially the Russian side proposed to supply natural gas in reverse order through Kazakhstan via the Central Asia-Center pipeline.

At the same time, the main condition of the Russian side was the transfer of the gas transmission system of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to the ownership of Gazprom at market value.

The Russian side also offered Uzbekistan to cede the rights to export gas to China. In this case, Gazprom would have become a party to the gas export agreement instead of UzGazTrade.

“According to the results of bilateral negotiations in December, it was possible to remove the conditions that the Russian side set,” the edition notes.

Uzbekistan and Russia plan to hold a series of additional meetings to assess the technical feasibility of gas supplies. “However, the scale of the necessary work requires the mobilization of significant amounts of funding. In this regard, the practical possibility of organizing supplies is unlikely,” the sources believe.