The Russian government’s theft of Yukos was in many ways a dress rehearsal. An experiment with a new methodology of using regulatory and tax pressure,faking the legal cover, spreading the spoils of the take to enough international partners so as to split up the complicity, and monitoring the international reaction or lack thereof. As a learning experience, it was quite effective, and now the Kremlin has gotten much better at it, developing a specialty in “partial nationalizations,” a technique based on the assumption that if you leave your victim a nickel or two, he won’t tell anyone you took his lunch money. As Stanislav Belkovsky tells Reuters, “There have been no real victims recently. There are just different cash-out terms.” We of course beg to differ. After the cut is good story about the rush to close up two of the biggest deals involving Gazprom’s siege of TNK-BP and Deripaska’s foray in Norilsk before the relative certainty of the Putin era comes to close.