Kyiv, April 29 (Interfax-Ukraine) – Reverse gas supplies to Ukraine from Europe started in November 2012 and are absolutely legal, gas market experts have said.

"These are absolutely legal procedures and transactions; gas is physically moved from Ukraine to Poland and from Poland to Ukraine. There are pipelines for pumping gas from Poland to Ukraine, and this is not a virtual or paper reverse procedure for Ukraine," Deputy Chairman of the Expert Committee for the Gas Industry and the Natural Gas Market, Leonid Unihovsky, said at a press conference at Interfax-Ukraine on Friday.

The expert also said that there is no clause banning the resale of gas by Germany's RWE bought from Gazprom or other structures to third parties in the contract between the said companies.

"I want to say that while earlier in Gazprom's contracts with European companies there was a ban on the resale of this gas to third parties, now under demand by the European Commission all of the contracts do not contain this ban. In my opinion, if RWE sells this gas to Ukraine and the procedures for gas pumping from Germany to Poland are agreed, and services in gas transportation from Germany to Poland and to Ukraine are paid for, are fulfilled, these are absolutely legal transactions," Unihovsky added.

He said hat the operator of the Ukrainian gas transport system – public joint-stock company Ukrtransgaz – has done a lot of work to make it possible to pump gas from Europe.

"[This concerns] gas transport system operators: how can they optimize gas flows and how is this gas pumped via pipelines? So from the legal point of view, in the conditions of matching – matching the real physical pumping of gas by pipelines, taking into account the expenses on transportation from Germany to Ukraine, the procedure is legal," he said.

An independent energy expert, Valentyn Zemliansky, said that representatives of Russia's Gazprom have all the required data on the full lawfulness of reverse gas pumping.

"When Russia says that it does not know what is going on in the Ukrainian gas transport system, this is not true, due to the reason that Gazprom's representatives are present at gas metering stations on the border of Ukraine and they see all data on the physical gas pumping volumes," the expert said.

He said that Gazprom's attempts to present Ukraine's actions on reverse gas supplies as transactions on gas replacement do not have grounds.

"Gazprom is trying to present Ukraine's actions as carrying out swap transactions, when gas remains on the territory of the country and it is replaced by similar volumes. It's really that three parties are to be participants of the transaction. In this situation there could not be claims from Gazprom, as gas physically passes the border," Zemliansky said.

"The sides are well-informed on how gas is moved in the gas transport system, if all the volumes passed the Russian-Ukrainian border and Ukrainian-European border whether it be Poland, Hungary or Slovakia," the expert said.