That Russian gas was sold to Europe at four times the going price in the US gave Tarasov and his partners a licence to print money. They together with INI raked in vast profits from the Russian companies they had invested in. There was, however, a catch: eighty-percent of Russian gas exports to Europe flowed through a network pipelines that criss-crossed the Ukraine, where the risk of conflict grew as relations with Moscow progressively deteriorated.
If gas supplies to Western Europe were cut, the EU would be deprived of a large and vital part of its energy, and the damage, at least in the short term, would be more painful than the effects of post-Lehman economic crisis, closer to that of the oil embargo of the early seventies during the Yom Kippur War, when the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries came close to paralysing Western Europe’s economy.
INI, not wanting to put all its eggs in the same basket, had together with Gazprom, invested in the development of the newly discovered Aphrodite and Leviathan gas fields off the coast of Cyprus, a miraculous find with reserves worth hundreds of billions dollars. Regretfully, that would not happen overnight and Gazprom’s most immediate task was to combat accusations that Russian producers were manipulating prices in the European gas market.