Sounds like a negotiated contract being modified, ex post facto, and a new benchmark being put into place. Political revenge or not, this ain’t a cool thing. If both sides inked it, they should honor it.
Then as it ends, the EU should sign one they find meets their needs.
“Sounds like a negotiated contract being modified, ex post facto, and a new benchmark being put into place.”
No, that is totally wrong. The contract/s used a formula, but the formula failed to remove ambiguities in which benchmarks were intended to be used by the parties as the basis for applying the formulae. Gazprom took advantage of the ambiguities to charge a greater amount than the customer had agreed to pay. The customer paid the price demanded by the seller while reserving the right to dispute the seller’s interpretation of the contract terms pending a resolution of the dispute. The contracts typically include terms requiring the submission of such disputes to some form of arbitration for settlement. In this instance the agreed upon arbitration tribunal examined the contract and decided the plaintiff, RWE, was correct in its interpretation of the contract terms and introduced a new method of reckoning the basis to remove the ambiguities relied upon by Gazprom to produce a higher price than RWE has chosen to agree upon. This is typical in such commercial disputes between domestic public oil and gas companies. The participation of the Russian Gazprom monopoly is different to the extent the monopoly is used by the Russian state to implement coercive extortion or shakedowns of the economies of their foreign partners in furtherance of aggression.