BAKU, Aug 20 (AFP) - Ukraine`s Odessa-Brody oil pipeline could still pump Caspian Sea crude, despite signing a deal to ship oil from Russian fields instead, the country`s chief diplomat in Azerbaijan told reporters Friday.
The decision to pump Russian oil in place of the Caspian crude favoured by Washington was widely seen as a sign that Ukraine -- a key battleground in the fight for influence in the region between Russia and Washington -- was leaning towards Moscow.
But Igor Kizima, Ukraine`s charge d`affaires in Azerbaijan, a major Caspian Sea oil exporter, said the deal to export Russian oil was only a temporary stop-gap measure.
"The question of Caspian Sea oil has been very much on the agenda for Ukraine... (and) it remains on the agenda," the diplomat told a press conference in Azerbaijan`s capital, Baku. "Ukraine will definitely return to this question."
He added: "Today an agreement has been reached about the pumping of Russian oil but that was linked to short-term benefits since the Odessa-Brody pipeline had been empty for a long time."
"When the agreement was signed with Russia it included the caveat that the agreement was only temporary."
Ukraine`s pipeline monopoly Ukrtransnafta signed a deal earlier this summer with the British-Russian joint venture BP-TNK to export up to nine million tonnes a year of Siberian oil through the pipeline.
Start-up oil is being pumped to fill the pipeline and commercial operations are expected to begin from October this year.
The oil is to flow from Brody, near Ukraine`s border with Poland, to the port of Odessa on Ukraine`s Black Sea coast -- the opposite direction to the one originally intended when the pipeline was built.
The pipeline was conceived, with US backing, to export Caspian Sea oil onward from the Black Sea to Poland and possibly Germany while at the same time bypassing Russia.
Washington saw the Odessa-Brody route as a way to reduce the world oil market`s dependence on Russian oil and Russian pipelines.
However, since its completion about two years ago, the pipeline has stood empty, partly because new fields in the Capsian have taken longer to come on stream than expected.
With the pipeline increasingly looking like the petroleum sector`s equivalent of a white elephant, Ukraine signed the deal with BP-TNK, despite lobbying from the US government to wait for the Caspian crude.