Russia has begun supplying natural gas to Ukraine again.

Russia's Gazprom energy giant has forced Ukraine to purchase natural gas on an upfront payment basis.

Yesterday, a representative from the gas transport company Ukrtransgaz confirmed that Ukraine has resumed importing natural gas from Russia. Accordingly, the volume of gas Ukraine imports from Russia is 43.5 million cubic meters per day.

For the past few months, Ukraine has been mired in an energy crisis (photo: RT).

Russia stopped supplying natural gas to Ukraine on June 16th when Ukraine was unable to repay billions of dollars in debt and repeatedly demanded price reductions.

Therefore, gas supplies were only resumed on December 7th when Ukraine's Naftogaz gas company paid Gazprom $378 million for 1 billion cubic meters of gas, meeting the country's gas needs for December. According to the contract, gas supplies were to resume two days after the payment was made by Ukraine.

According to the agreement between Naftogaz and Gazprom, Ukraine is obligated to pay Russia the full amount of its $3.1 billion debt by the end of the year, in exchange for Moscow resuming gas supplies to Ukraine until the end of March 2015.

According to VOV