Russian oil companies will soon be able to restart their oil projects in Kurdistan after the semi-autonomous Iraqi region and the federal government of Iraq resolved all their disagreements regarding oil production and exports, Russian Energy Minister Sergei Tsivilev said on Thursday.

“We received crucial information [from the Iraqi authorities], and both the minister and the prime minister assured us that the issues related to disagreements between the federal government [of Iraq] and the Kurdistan government have been resolved,” Russia media quoted Tsivilev as saying.

“This is very important for us, because Russian companies had entered Kurdistan earlier and had agreements with the Kurdistan government. They invested money in fields located in Kurdistan,” the minister added.

These projects, however, were frozen due to the disagreements between the federal government of Iraq and the authorities of the semi-autonomous region in northern Iraq.

Following the settling of all outstanding disputes, Russia has been assured that “everything has been worked out,” and “these projects will start operating literally in the near future,” the Russian minister told reporters after a meeting of an Iraqi-Russian commission on trade and cooperation.

raq’s Oil Minister Hayyan Abdul Ghani said last week that Iraq and Kurdistan expect to complete all work to resume oil exports from the semi-autonomous Iraqi region by the end of March, following a two-year hiatus due to a dispute over authority over crude flows.

Oil exports from Kurdistan have now been halted for nearly two years, after they were shut in since March 2023 due to a dispute over who should authorize the Kurdish exports.

Source: OILPRICE