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Russia asserts clout in Ukraine

AFP, Moscow
In forcing Ukraine to accept a fast shift to market prices for its gas. Russia has managed to remind all in stark terms that it still has considerable influence on its exSoviet neighbour, analysts say.
Yet the pricing accord between the two countries announced in the early hours of Sunday is a pyrrhic victory at best for Russia, capping a dispute that has only heightened international suspicion of Moscow.
While Russia appears to have obtained many of the immediate economic goals it sought publicly, and probably some deeper political objectives it privately hoped to achieve, it has done so at a high cost to its own reputation.
"On the face of it, the Kremlin has won." said Vladimir Pribyiovsky, an expert on Russian policy with the Moscow-based Panorama think tank.
"But in the abstract, it has not pursued a particularly good policy and it could ultimately lose" more than it gains from its gas conflict with Ukraine, he said.
He said that in addition to putting Ukraine on a fast-track to paying market rates for gas. Moscow had also managed to undermine President Viktor Yushchenko and his policy of integrating Ukraine in NATO and other Western institutions.
"Russia has tried to discredit Yushchenko completely" during the gas dispute in recent weeks, said Pribyiovsky.
"This has been successful, to some extent at least. They have discredited not just Yushchenko but the nationalist forces in Ukraine. Just how successful this has been will become more clear in the next elections."
Russia has long argued that as an independent, sovereign state Ukraine must begin paying market rates for Russian gas just as other European countries, including for example the ex-Soviet Baltic states, have done for years.
Under the gas deal outlined by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Yulia Tymoshenko, that is exactly what Kiev has agreed to do, despite previously rejecting this unless other conditions were met.
Putin and Tymoshenko said Ukraine would pay full market rates from January 1 next year and. until then, would buy gas from Russia at market rates but with a 20-pcrcent discount for the remainder of the year.
Russia meanwhile will pay Ukraine full market rates from the start of 2010 for transit of its gas to Europe, but will continue paying the substantially lower 2008