As I write, the state of Gazprom’s dispute with Ukraine remains unclear. The Russian company is declaring victory, but the government that has apparently agreed to pay Gazprom’s missing $1.3bn is the old one, not the new one that is expected to come to power after the elections at the weekend.

Further west, consumers who suddenly found they needed to know about Ukraine in January 2006, when the last dispute over gas supplies turned nasty, can afford to stay relaxed, for now at least. European gas prices have barely twitched. There is plenty of gas in storage – except in Italy – and the weather is warm. European solidarity with Ukraine, however earnestly expressed, will not have much political force behind it.

The worrying thing for Ukraine is that ten years from now, it could be even more isolated. At the moment, it is still a very important transit country: 80 per cent of Gazprom’s exports to Europe go through it. But Gazprom’s strategy is to by-pass transit countries as much as it can, with projects such as Nord Stream and South Stream. Even Nabucco, the EU’s favourite pipe-dream pipeline, might end up carrying quite a lot of Russian gas, through Turkey and into Austria. If those pipelines get built, Ukraine could be needed for only 40 per cent of Gazprom’s exports. And that will make choking off gas supplies that much easier.

By the way, if you want to know everything there is to know about gas in Ukraine, a great place to start is an excellent paper by Simon Pirani of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, available here.