Gas pains

One of the odder sidebars to the ongoing mess in Ukraine is the suggestion that the country would be much better off if it could arrange a "reverse flow" of natural gas from Europe to reduce its dependence on supplies from Russia.  Norway is a big gas producer, and Poland is starting to frack, but if most of Europe had any supplies of its own, it surely wouldn't be importing so much from Russia, would it?

That's a rhetorical question, of course, because as this recent piece from the New York Times explains, what Ukraine wants to do is to import back from Slovakia gas that the latter has imported from....Russia! (via Ukraine, of course).

You wouldn't think that the Russians would agree to that, but as the article states, Gazprom has no problem in principle with the reverse flow proposal, though it doesn't seem inclined to make it easy.  One can only guess that the reason Gazprom might be prepared to play along is that Slovakia, unlike Ukraine, would actually pay for the gas it took.  Sounds like a win-win deal, at least until the Slovaks realize that Ukraine is no more able to pay them than it is to pay Gazprom.