On Sunday, Jan. 1, pressure in the natural-gas pipelines traversing Ukraine from Russia to Europe began to drop, and western governments backed up Kiev's howls of complaint that Russia's state-run gas giant, Gazprom, was trying to strong-arm the westward-leaning nation by ceasing deliveries of a precious natural resource. On Wednesday, Moscow and Kiev cut a deal  : Russia would receive its sudden four-fold increase in the price of natural gas ($230 per 1000 cubic meters, up from about $50), but Ukraine would pay only $95, in a complicated arrangement involving a middleman trading company. German newspapers digested this settlement on Thursday morning and tried to guess what it meant for Europe's future energy dependence on Moscow.

Commentators almost exclusively saw Russia as a newly dangerous leviathan, using its massive gas reserves and state-controlled monopoly to frighten governments throughout its former Soviet sphere of influence. Most of them also agreed that cutting off gas to Ukraine at the precise deadline -- Jan. 1 -- was a warning shot for other governments that rely on Russia to keep their people warm. Ukraine has leaned toward Western Europe, and NATO, since its democratic revolution last year, but more shuttered and Moscow-friendly nations, like Belarus, still get cheap subsidized gas. It didn't help Russia's image that the same pipelines that serve Ukraine also bring natural gas to much of the European Union -- or that European governments had started to worry about their gas reserves. The newspapers weren't so unanimous, though, on whether Russia had won this showdown, or lost.

"The Kremlin obviously underestimated the reaction at every level," argues the conservative daily Die Welt. "Using natural gas as a weapon, (Russian President Vladimir) Putin had hoped to discipline Ukrainian President Victor Yuschchenko, and help his opponent in an upcoming parliamentary election. He accomplished the reverse." A cry of protest went up across Europe, which the editors believe took Putin by surprise -- he hadn't meant to threaten the west. "Putin, who has promoted himself for years in the west as a reliable supplier of energy resources ... had to watch while his image was transformed, in a matter of days," writes the paper.

The business paper Financial Times Deutschland wonders where the quick and reasonable compromise came from, after the dramatic loss of pressure in the pipes. "One wonders why such a solution couldn't have been reached immediately, before there was uproar in Europe," wonders the paper. "Evidently a draft compromise existed. But Russia wanted to shock the world ... maybe it's dawning even on some Moscow strategists that this show of strength hurt Russia above all."

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung agreed that "Moscow burned its fingers with the gas dispute in the first days of the new year ... The Kremlin wanted to show the Ukrainians that they can't heat their homes with democracy. But they only managed to hurry a process of alienation between supposed brother-countries." The paper writes that until this crisis, Russia had a "flawless reputation" as a supplier of natural resources. "But in this squabble with Ukraine, Russia gave the world a taste of what it means when huge reserves of a natural resource lie in the hands of an authoritarian power -- the resource becomes a weapon, rather than a commodity." Now the world knows Moscow can't be trusted.

The left-wing daily Die Tageszeitung also saw a net loss for Putin. "Russia has failed to take over the Ukrainian pipelines that supply energy to the west -- whereas a similar attempt at power-politics worked in Belarus." But dependence on Russian natural gas has returned energy politics to the focus of public discussion in Western and Central Europe, writes the paper. "In all the affected countries, a new debate over atomic energy has broken out." Die Tageszeitung has been known to weigh in heavily against nuclear power in the past, but the commentator on Thursday didn't open that radioactive debate.