With the Russian-Ukrainian gas dispute now settled, in a murky but apparently satisfactory fashion, it is time to reflect on what the affair says about the West's relations with Russia, and still more importantly the West's relations with Ukraine. It would be nice to think that now that the gas to Ukraine has been turned up, the kind that has been swelling many Western pundits in recent days might be turned down a little, but unfortunately a Russian diet always seems to produce in them a particularly volcanic degree of flatulence.

The reason why a serious debate is necessary in the West is that in recent months, and even over the past ten years, the West's strategy towards Ukraine has been founded on a bizarre illusion: that Ukraine would leave Russia's orbit and "join the West", and that Russia would pay for this process. If continued, this self-deception could lead to a severe geopolitical defeat.

Consider the figures: Until the latest price hike for gas, Russia was supplying Ukraine with a de facto annual energy subsidy estimated by independent experts at somewhere between $3 billion and $5 billion a year. That is more than the whole of EU aid in the 14 years since Ukrainian independence. As to US bilateral aid, last year it stood at a mere $174 million - and this after all the talk of US admiration and support for Ukraine's Orange Revolution. Even after the latest price rise, Ukraine will remain greatly favored by international standards, though now more at the ultimate expense of Turkmenistan than Russia.

Equally important for the Ukrainian economy have been the remittances sent back annually by the millions of Ukrainians working legally in Russia. Once again, contrast Western approaches to this question: It remains extremely difficult for Ukrainians to gain permits to work legally in Western countries; and when the last German Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, tried to relax the terms for entry into Germany, the result was an outburst of chauvinist hysteria in Germany about a supposed resulting flood of Ukrainian criminals and prostitutes.

Recent days have seen a great deal of self-righteous moralizing in the US and European media about Russia using energy as a political tool. It would be better if the Americans and French in particular turned the question round and asked themselves whether there would be the slightest possibility of their countries giving aid on this scale without expecting massive and concrete geopolitical and economic benefits as a result.

The underlying thinking in Brussels and Washington concerning Ukraine is rather different, with as so often Europeans holding the prize for cynicism, and Americans for recklessness. Under all the talk about Ukraine's European path, a majority of West European governments and EU officials privately hope that any real prospect of Ukrainian EU membership can be postponed virtually indefinitely - at least until after Turkish membership, which may come to the same thing. They are certainly not going to ask their voters to come up with anything like the massive aid that Ukraine needs in order radically to reform its economy along Western lines.

Nor of course is the US going to take up this burden. Instead, a growing number of US officials and politicians seem to see early NATO membership for Ukraine as a cheap alternative, with little economic cost to the US, and that little offset by benefits to US arms manufacturers.

This however would mean taking into what remains in effect an anti-Russian alliance a country which is still deeply entwined with Russia economically, demographically and culturally; where in the free last round of the presidential elections, 44 per cent of the population voted against a Western path and in favor of alliance with Russia; and where according to opinion polls an overwhelming majority of the population is opposed to NATO membership.

In addition, as events since the Orange Revolution have demonstrated, Ukraine remains a volatile and unconsolidated democracy, whose political and business elites remain deeply ambivalent about real economic reform. And a future world economic crisis, especially one consequent on international energy sources, could completely redraw both the political and geopolitical maps of Ukraine.

Meanwhile, unless Russia can somehow also be integrated into the West, Ukraine's successful move out of the Russian orbit would face Russia with another set of terrible economic, cultural and geopolitical defeats, including in the long term the loss of Ukrainian markets for Russian goods and a severe diminution of the international reach of the Russian language.

Russia's opposition to this threat to its vital interests may therefore be crudely and incompetently conducted, but it is entirely understandable in terms both of history and of the likely behavior of the US and France in similar circumstances. At the very least, for the West to expect Russia to pay for its own defeat is crazy as well as utterly hypocritical.

Anatol Lieven is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, and a member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy. His latest book is America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism.

This article was originally published in the International Herald Tribune, January 6th 2006, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.