Rferl.org: Russian Gas: How Much Is That?

One price does not fit all for Russia's European gas consumers. A study of publicly available data shows that West European countries pay less to Gazprom, the Russian state-run gas giant, than do poorer Central and East European countries.

So why do Poland and the Czech Republic pay over $500 per thousand cubic meters of gas, while across the border Germany pays less than $400?

"Gazprom prices according to what the alternatives in those countries are," says James Henderson, a Russian oil and gas industry expert at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. "It essentially acts as a discriminating monopolist. If it has a significant market share in a country, or if it can see that a country has limited alternatives, then it prices accordingly."
MORE