Energy is a surprisingly weak political weapon.

There is obviously no love lost between Putin and Ukraine, whose president, Viktor Yushchenko, Putin's agents once poisoned. Without a doubt, Putin has no desire to support a government that detests him in a country that fears him by continuing to sell Ukraine natural gas at below-market prices, as Russia did under earlier agreements. But what's really at stake here is not an effort to use natural gas as a lever to control Ukrainian or Western European policy. It is to wring the maximum price that Putin can get from gas customers.

In this way, the battle over gas between Russia and Ukraine is actually similar to the battles over fees that Time Warner has fought with ABC, which it briefly took off its cable systems in 2006, and Viacom, whose channels it nearly took off the air a few days ago before reaching a last-minute agreement. Just as Time Warner, beset with enormous debt payments, has been willing to raise the stakes in its negotiations, so too is Russia (or, if you insist, "Gazprom"—though when it comes to policy questions Gazprom or the Kremlin are interchangeable) taking a much harder line now that the price of oil, its other major energy export, is tumbling. It is doing this, it's worth noting, in advance of negotiations with Ukraine about how much Russia will have to pay to transport its natural gas through Ukrainian pipes to the rest of Europe. That's a negotiation in which it will be Ukraine's turn to demand higher prices, leading to higher prices in Europe for which Russia will blame the Ukrainians.

Putin's hooliganry is a very effective negotiating posture. If you want to get more money from your customers, it certainly doesn't hurt to show them how much they need you. Over the long run, Putin's muscle flexing will push Europe to work harder to develop new sources of energy. In the short term, however, Putin's willingness to create chaos strengthens his hand in getting billions more from Ukraine, whose gas purchases Western Europe may have to end up subsidizing, and from the Western Europeans themselves. In the end, however, the gas shut-off is a negotiating posture, not a battle for political supremacy. Russia, like every other energy exporter in the world, needs its customers. Battles over the sale and transport of oil and gas have a funny way of getting resolved; in their brief war, Georgia shut off the pipeline that brings Russian gas to Ossetia-now even those countries are on the verge of a new agreement.

The same button that controls the transport of oil or gas in one direction also, not coincidentally, controls the transport of money in the other. The oil or gas exporter that shuts off the supply is standing in a vacuum-sealed room with a finger on the button that pumps in air. But the question is, who can hold their breath longer. Putin has every reason not to hold his breath too long. For him, the skyrocketing price of oil has been a tremendous boon—when oil prices go up, everybody who governs an oil-exporting country looks like a genius. The hundreds of billions that the oil boom sent sloshing around the Russian economy has let Putin reward his cronies and still make the vast, angry Russian working class feel like it's getting a better deal than it got in the early post-Communist days. Now the falling price of oil threatens to turn the Putin surplus into a big government deficit even as Putin promises to increase services and raise pensions. Any imperial agenda Putin may have in Europe takes a back seat to keeping the hard currency coming in and satisfying the Russian constituencies that have accepted his bargain of trading democracy for prosperity. Ultimately, the oil and gas calculus always ends with the same reality: Whatever political advantage can be achieved in the future by turning the pipes off quickly gives way to the political and financial advantages that can be achieved in the present by turning them on.