The heads of Ukraine and Poland had conducted an agreement to reverse the movement of a key oil pipeline in the Western Ukraine in the middle of 2008, a move to improve regional energy security and reduce dependence on Russian crude.

The 670-kilometer Odessa-Brody pipeline is at the moment used to transfer Russian oil southward for export via the Black Sea from the port of Odessa.

But President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko and his Polish counterpart Lech Kaczynski pledged to reverse to the pipeline's original design and begin shipping oil from Caspian Sea real estates such as Azerbaijan Northward from Odessa to Brody, near the Polish border.

"Only such a direction option of using Odessa-Brody has future. Any other options simply can't exist," Yushchenko noted.

"I am sure that this project will be implemented," Kaczynski was quoted as saying. "Naturally, it is in the Polish interest."

Yushchenko proclaimed that by middle of 2008, oil will start moving to the North in the pipeline to Brody, from where it will be transported further north by rail.

Under an agreement conducted between Poland, Lithuania, Azerbaijan and Georgia, the pipeline is to be prolonged 490 kilometers to the Polish port of Gdansk on the Baltic Sea.

Yushchenko predicted the prolongation could be built over the next two years, while Kaczynski predicted the real estate in Ukraine could be finished in 2011-2012, according to the statement.

Hence, Alexander Dikusarov, spokesman for the state pipeline company Ukrtransnafta property, reported that while construction of the extension will begin in the middle of 2008, the flow of the oil will be reversed later.

The following year, Yushchenko, the new Ukrainian and both pro-Western president, decided to revert to the original plan for moving shipments from Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan north and west from the Black Sea port.