Kyiv nationalized part of the Samara-Western Direction pipeline

The Economic Court of the Zhytomyr Region satisfied the claim of the State Property Fund of Ukraine (SPFU) on recognizing the state’s ownership of a part of the Samara-Western Direction oil product pipeline that runs through the country. The SPFU announced this on its Facebook (owned by Meta, an organization recognized and banned in the Russian Federation).

The Ukrainian department said that the oil product pipeline was built in 1957-1968. and was supposed to become the property of Ukraine after the collapse of the USSR, but this did not happen, and the facility belonged to the Russian company Transnefteprodukt.

Diesel fuel from the Russian Federation and Belarus was previously pumped to Europe through this pipeline. In February 2016, the pipe was sold to the Swiss International Trading Partners AG. In the winter of 2021, Kiev announced the nationalization of the pipeline, citing its “important national economic and defense importance,” and the operator of the pipeline, the Swiss trader Proton Energy Group, in response, refused to supply oil products to Ukraine.

As a result, since 2021, this asset has been managed by Ukrtransnafta, in the same year, the State Property Fund filed a lawsuit to recognize the pipeline as the property of the state, at the end of June the court satisfied the claim.

In 2022, the Ukrainian authorities adopted the law “On the Basic Principles for the Compulsory Seizure in Ukraine of Objects of the Property Rights of the Russian Federation and Its Residents”, which involves the nationalization of property and financial resources of individuals and legal entities from the Russian Federation in Ukraine.