In January 2016, the Russian media reported that Russia’s gas giant, Gazprom, had discontinued all purchases of natural gas from Turkmenistan and was not planning to resume imports any time soon. This information was later confirmed in a company statement released in mid-March, containing some revelatory details about what had led to a sudden rift between Gazprom and its Turkmenistani counterpart, state-owned Turkmengas. Gazprom had previously sought to alter the contractual price of natural gas it had been buying from the Central Asian country, given that its own gas deliveries to Europe, whose price is tethered to the price of crude oil, have been significantly discounted since the middle of 2014. According to media reports, the 2010 contract between Gazprom and Turkmengas settled on a price of $240 per thousand cubic meters, but the Russian gas firm had already attempted to modify the previous arrangement as early as 2008 […]