This is about who gets the loot. This is one of the juiciest, and most discreet, bits of loot for Russian and Ukrainian officialdom. As I write in the other thread, I suspect that Yuschenko has tried to clean up the Ukrainian side of this and both the Russians and the Ukrainain oligarchs who used to profit from this are trying to prevent that, in an unusually public way. The Russians are playing a very dangerous game, because if the Europeans see them as using the gas deliveries as a political weapon, they will hurry to find alternatives, and you'll see LNG terminals or Mediterranean pipelines for African gas financed and given priority rather than Baltic pipelines.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes