1. Actually, it's the other way round: it's the Ukrainians who pushed for reopening the contract despite it having several years to run. As I explain in one of the diaries linked near the top of my story, that's linked to in-fighting between Ukrainian factions vying to be in control of that "private" (and highly profitable) deal to deliver not-Gazprom gas to Ukraine;

2. Yuschenko never was "Moscow's boy", but he was seen as more pragmatic and less opposed to Russian business interests that Yanukovich (who was clearly the top guy of the Ukrainian industrialists of the East of the country, a group wary of their bigger Russian competitors). Why Putin suddenly decided to drop his neutrality toward Yuschenko to back Yanukovich is a mystery to me - and probably was a mistake.

Note that I am not particularly pro-Russia, just really annoyed at some of the arguments used to bash Russia today, which are highly hypocritical. I am comfortable saying this because I've been criticizing Putin for years, and I had no illusions about his peculiar form of "democracy" before, and i'm not suddenly raising the topic today because I'm unhappy about his hardball, but perfectly legitimate, negotiating stance on gas, like the people I criticize today.