E. Nigma: My guess is that sometime next winter, when the ground is frozen, Mother Russia will close the gas valves that supply Ukraine

Ukraine consumed around 80 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas a year in 2004–2005. 20 bcm of that was of Ukraine’s own production.

However, the bulk of Russia’s oil pipeline network feeds into Ukraine for further transport to Germany and Italy, etc. (Warning to Doug, map is a PDF). Ukraine gets paid 17 bcm per year simply as a fee not to turn off this stream between Russia and Europe.

Since the intent is to stop all gas shipment to Ukraine to scare them, or punish them, this means the Russians will have to cut off all the gas for transshipment in their entire southern network (lest Ukraine divert some of this to freezing homes), leaving only one pipe into Poland operating.

So we will get news stories of the mean Russian bear freezing Ukrainian children as the Ukraine is forced to make do with gas supplies at about 1/4 of normal, (no doubt supplemented by a shift to electric space heaters powered by oil shipped from Georgia to Odessa). But we will also have Putin’s cronies steadily being impoverished as they find themselves unable to move most of their natural gas to markets in Europe (since the one pipe in the north will be at capacity). There’s a rising level of pain on both sides.

My bet is that the robber barons in Russia blink first, since they are upstream and don’t get paid until the downstreamers pass the gas through to the final customers.