Russian Industry and Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko was in the Vietnamese capital Hanoi this week when he commented on a decision by the Turkmen leadership to raise the price of natural gas. But his words may have had the greatest impact all the way back in Kyiv, where they came as a grim reminder Ukraine's gas woes are far from over.
Writing about the 1967 Six Day War in his 2001 memoirs, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said that "While the border disputes between Syria and ourselves were of great significance, the matter of water diversion was a stark issue of life and death."
The Ukrainian government announced earlier in March that it has suspended its participation in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) Election Monitoring Organization, a group that has gained notoriety by often proclaiming elections in former Soviet republics to be free and fair, in contrast to other monitoring groups that find the same elections to be flawed.
