I’m grateful to the commenter John who guided me toward this link for the report sponsored by the Swedish Ministry of Defence on energy security and the North European Gas Pipeline, otherwise known as Nord Stream.  I was a little too hasty and did not see the link in the New York Times story.  One reason I may have missed this one is that it was published in back in 2006 – meaning we would certainly have to add to the quoted number of times (55) that Russia has cut energy supplies to apply political pressure.  At any rate, here is the section from the paper that details the methodology of coercive energy policy.

Russia’s Coercive Energy Policy in Aggregated Terms

If these cases are penetrated and put in a wider context, a pattern emerges, namely that the energy lever can be used in several ways and serve several purposes. By and large, these actions can have military, political, social, economic or other non-military foreign-policy related underpinnings. The imminent reasons or drivers could be several, i.e. relate to a will to enforce some kind of political concession in ongoing negotiations, enforce infrastructure take-over, enforce economically favourable deals and make a political statement. 151 All incidents where Russia has used the energy weapon are political statements in one way or another, but in the 1990s, the driver of enforcing concessions was common. The findings further draw attention to the fact that Russia’s previous usage of the energy tool has taken many forms, namely: