I will confess to feeling a certain level of exhaustion with the Ukraine-Russia natural gas dispute.  Therefore I’ll let the Economist do some heavy lifting for me, which describes the fight in three layers – the pricing, the politics, and the quieter fight between the businessmen (best captured by Jérôme Guillet and John Evans in the FT).  To talk about the dispute without considering all three of these issues at once is to misunderstand what has happened (this is precisely what too many talking heads are doing on TV, thus driving me crazy).

Had this been a purely commercial dispute, a compromise would surely have been struck. But as ever with Russia and its neighbours, there are second-layer political undercurrents. Little love has been lost between Ukraine and Russia ever since the “orange revolution” brought anti-Russians to power in Kiev four years ago. Recently, Russia has accused the Ukrainians of supplying arms to Georgia during the war in August and said it would take this into account when forming its policy. “A more serious crime than arms deliveries in a conflict zone cannot be imagined,” Mr Putin told Yulia Tymoshenko, his Ukrainian counterpart, when the two discussed gas prices in October.