Russia and Ukraine settled their price dispute over natural gas on Wednesday when national energy companies in both countries surrendered control over all of the gas supply to Ukraine to a middleman company of uncertain ownership. The murky solution allowed both nations to claim victory, though Russia emerged with its reputation on world energy markets bruised after disrupting natural gas supplies to Europe in the middle of winter. Ukraine's gas utility bill will about double. Under the deal, Russia will sell natural gas to the intermediary company at the price it had demanded from Ukraine, $230 per 1,000 cubic meters, while Ukraine will buy gas from that company as it comes into the country for $95.

Ukraine has been paying at a rate of $50 to Russia

The company will balance out the price at $95 by selling Ukraine less of the expensive Russian natural gas and more lower-priced gas from Central Asia. The gas from the Central Asian nations of Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan will sell for only $50 and $60 per 1,000 cubic meters. At the center of the complex deal is an offshore energy trading company that has for a decade, under various names, shipped natural gas to Ukraine from the Central Asian country of Turkmenistan, a business exploiting the price differentials in former Soviet markets. Exactly who walked away from the negotiating table with what benefits was obscured behind the secrecy surrounding the intermediary, RosUkrEnergo, and vague promises by Ukrainian officials that this company would be reformed in the months ahead to fulfill its new role.

Ukraine's national security adviser, Anatoly Kinakh, said in an interview that the deal would increase the importance of Central Asian natural gas in Ukraine's fuel mix, moving away from Russian supplies. That dovetailed with Ukraine's efforts to diversify its sources of fuel, he said though Russia still controls the pipelines leading to Ukraine, and, according to analysts, a majority interest in RosUkrEnergo through unidentified proxy owners. "We have reached an agreement that is mutually beneficial and therefore mutually acceptable," Aleksei Ivchinko, the director of Ukraine's national gas company, Naftogaz, said in Moscow after signing the agreement.

The deal, Ivchinko said, would guarantee Ukraine's domestic supply as well as the transshipment of Russian gas to other European countries something that had Europe and world energy markets jittery in the opening days of this year. Crude oil prices dipped slightly on the latest news. The companies also reached agreement on the price that Ukraine will charge Russia for shipping gas across its territory to Europe. Gazprom, Russia's natural gas monopoly, will pay $1.60 to ship 1,000 cubic meters for 100 kilometers, up from the current price of $1.09, according to Ivchinko. The higher price that Ukraine will pay for natural gas may prove a Pyrrhic victory for Russia, as Western European countries that are Moscow's primary natural gas customers said Wednesday they will seek to diversify their sources of energy.

The disruption in the natural gas flow from fields in the Siberian Arctic and Central Asia was the first ever, according to Martin Bartenstein, the economy minister of Austria, which holds the rotating presidency of the European Union. The Soviet Union began exporting natural gas to Western Europe in 1968.

Russian gas supplies will remain "the backbone of European energy supplies, but certainly we will have to learn the lesson of what has happened in the last few days," Bartenstein said, according to Reuters.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia, speaking at his dacha outside Moscow, called the settlement reached Wednesday a guarantee of energy supplies to Europe. "I think undoubtedly this success will have a positive effect on the whole sphere of Russian-Ukrainian relations," Putin said. "We can work not just with each other but also together in the market of third countries."

Ukraine's prime minister, Yuriy Yekhanurov, said that the higher prices would impel Ukrainian industry to become more energy efficient, perhaps in the longer term forcing the pace of modernization at mammoth Soviet-era factories, but added that the immediate consequences of higher prices could be bankruptcies at some chemical and metallurgical plants. These two energy-intensive sectors form the core of Ukraine's exports. "I will not say who won or who lost," Yekhanurov said. "The people of Ukraine and Russia won. Europe won because it will calmly receive gas. Common sense won."

Behind the announcements lies a company with a troubling history in Ukraine, one that in the 1990s carved the most lucrative bits of Ukraine's gas market for itself and won exclusive, and profitable, rights to transship gas over Gazprom's domestic pipeline system. The company first conducting this business was known as Itera, one of the many subsidiaries, daughter companies and joint ventures that tapped into the vast and then poorly audited revenue flows of Gazprom, according to analysts who follow Gazprom. When Putin brought new management to Gazprom, many such schemes dried up. But the Ukrainian middlemen stayed in business.

Former executives at Gazprom and Naftogaz had interests in the deal, according to Jerome Guillet, a Paris-based banker and authority on Gazprom's business practices. "The names change every year, but it's always been the same mechanism," he said in a telephone interview. "The Ukrainians that were previously part of the deal are being kicked out," after the change of leadership in Ukraine after the Orange Revolution, he said. "The new leaders are trying to put their people in. You have a huge trade with hundreds of millions of dollars being captured by a small number of people."

Until officials specify how the company will operate in its new role, he said, the significance of Wednesday's settlement remain murky. Some Ukrainian officials appeared almost giddy Wednesday after staring down Russia in the dispute, even though the country will now pay higher gas tariffs. "The price of freedom just went up a little bit," said one official, who said he did not want to further aggravate relations with Russia by speaking publicly of victory. Yet the elevated role of RosUkrEnergo troubled others in Ukraine's turbulent political class. "The point was to eliminate a suspicious intermediary," Grigory Nemurya, an adviser to Yulia Tymoshenko, the former prime minister and leader of the Orange Revolution who this autumn fell out with President Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine.

"Now Ukraine depends on this company even more."

The deal settled economic and political turmoil in the dispute, he said, but failed to address widespread corruption in the gas business in the former Soviet states. "It's another time bomb that could explode later, further down the road."