Washington Post: Gas deal in Ukraine disputed

Ukraine is moving to settle a long-running dispute over its purchase of natural gas, with a big payout to its supplier. The populist leader of the political opposition, former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, says the settlement is a giant swindle and has called on the International Monetary Fund to suspend its loans to her country.

The supplier, a murky company called RosUkrEnergo (RUE), will receive the compensation in the form of 12.1 billion cubic meters of natural gas, which is worth close to $3 billion. In January 2009, when Tymoshenko was prime minister, she had engineered a deal with Russia that cut out RUE from gas transactions. The company claimed that this amounted to a confiscation of its property. Read the story here.