Naftogaz blamed the 2020 loss on several factors:

writing off $830 million in long overdue debts with private gas distributors; the 2019 ‘unbundling’ that shifted revenues from Russian gas transit outside the Naftogaz group; and “record low prices” of gas. In December 2019, Naftogaz made a wrong way bet on European natural gas prices, which then plummeted by almost two thirds in the first quarter of 2020, to the lowest level in a decade. In April, Andriy Favorov, the company’s director of gas sales, was fired.