By Stuart Burns
In the short term, a new five-year gas transit agreement between Russia and Ukraine, agreed just 12 days before the current agreement is to expire, is good news for Europe, Russia and Ukraine - a rare example of pragmatism and compromise in today's winner-takes-all approach to diplomacy.
But in the longer term, the agreement, heralding as it does a waning of the Russian-Ukrainian interdependency, removes an issue that demands a degree of cooperation and opens to the possibility that bilateral tensions could rise in the future.
Still, for now, as