Ukrainian private gas companies have reduced production by 32% during the full-scale war, while state-owned companies experienced only a 6% drop. The key reason is the gas export ban imposed in June 2022, which has been extended into 2025, Forbes Ukraine reported.
Over more than three years of Russia’s full-scale war, Ukraine’s gas production has dropped by 3.5% – to 19.1 billion cubic meters.
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During the full-scale war, only one private company in Ukraine, Nadra-GeoInvest, has increased gas production. Over this period, the company drilled three wells, each 5,800 meters deep, which turned out to be highly profitable, Forbes reported.
In 2024, Nadra-GeoInvest quadrupled its gas production compared to 2021.
The company ESCO-Pivnich came in second among Ukraine’s gas producers. However, its production also dropped significantly, by 28%.
Poltava Petroleum Company, owned by the British JKX Oil & Gas, reduced production by 31%.
Export ban caused losses to private gas companies
Private gas companies argue that extending the gas export ban into 2025 is unreasonable.
“The gas export ban made sense in 2022 when there was an energy crisis in Europe, and prices were at record highs, but now – there’s no clear reason for it,” Maksym Tymchenko, CEO of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, told Forbes Ukraine in April 2024.
According to Tymchenko, the export ban makes it difficult to predict prices and plan investments in production for the next one to two years.
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At the same time, the Ukrainian government believes that if they had not halted exports, Ukraine would have struggled to ensure domestic consumption.
“But if we hadn’t stopped exports, we would be sitting here without gas”, a high-ranking official from the Ukrainian Ministry of Energy told Forbes Ukraine on condition of anonymity.
To compensate for business losses, state-owned company Naftogaz has been buying gas from private companies since 2023, Forbes reported, referring to Mykhailo Svyshcho, an analyst at the consulting firm ExPro.
“This provides the state with a resource cheaper than imports and gives companies a stable buyer,” Svyshcho said.
Ukraine’s oligarchs comprise market’s majority, but Kolomoisky and Novynsky’s companies lost because of criminal investigations
According to Forbes, Ukraine’s largest private energy investor, DTEK, owned by Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, reduced production by 27% to 1.5 billion cubic meters, though it remains the leader among private companies.
Akhmetov is one of the few Ukrainian oligarchs who has not been sanctioned by Ukraine, the US, the EU, or other Western countries since February 2022 and continues to do business in Ukraine.
Oligarch Victor Pinchuk’s gas company, Geo-Alliance, reduced production by 32% but retained its seventh place in Ukraine’s gas production rankings, the media outlet wrote.
The hardest hit was Ukrnaftoburinnya, which was expropriated from oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky in May 2023. Before the full-scale war, the company ranked second, producing 0.8 billion cubic meters of gas.
In September 2023, Ihor Kolomoisky was arrested in Ukraine on charges of fraud and money laundering. He was imprisoned, and the court set bail at over Hr.500 million ($12.1 million), Ukrainian media Ukrainska Pravda reported.
From December 2023 to August 2024, the now-nationalized Ukrnaftoburinnya did not extract any gas because a court had blocked its special permit licenses for resource extraction following a lawsuit from the State Geological Service, Liga.net wrote.
The cancellation of Ukrnaftoburinnya’s license for gas extraction at the Sakhalin field in eastern Ukraine resulted in losses of approximately Hr.3 billion ($72.7 million) for the country, Ekonomichna Pravda reported.
Another gas company, Smart Energy, owned by oligarch Vadym Novynsky, produced only 90 million cubic meters of gas in 2024 – four times less than in 2021.
In January 2023, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky imposed sanctions on Novynsky, a former parliamentarian from opposition parties in the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s legislative body, Ukrainska Pravda reported.
In January 2025, law enforcement authorities officially charged Novynsky in absentia with treason and inciting religious hatred, Ukrainska Pravda wrote. Novynsky is widely known in Ukraine to support the Moscow-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which has spread Putin’s war rhetoric and collaborated with Russian forces close to the front line to help them fight the war against Ukraine.
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