ASTANA (Reuters) – Kazakhstan will seek contact with Ukraine in order to avoid any repeat of this week’s Ukrainian drone strike in southern Russia that hit a pumping station of the main Kazakh oil export pipeline, an official was quoted as saying on Wednesday.
The attack on the station belonging to the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) took place on Monday on the eve of talks between U.S. and Russian officials on ending the war in Ukraine.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said on Tuesday that oil flows through the CPC had dropped by about 30-40% because of the damage caused, and repairs might take several months.
“We will communicate with the Ukrainian side”, Kazakh news portal Informburo quoted First Deputy Foreign Minister Akan Rakhmetullin as saying.
“There will definitely be contacts here or in Kyiv. We must solve these issues in a diplomatic way to avoid this in the future,” Rakhmetullin said.
(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
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