A bad-tempered spat between Russia and Ukraine about the price of natural gas cannot compete for human interest with the tragedy of the miners’ families in West Virginia or the scandal of the Abramoff trial in Washington. But there is a human aspect to the Russian pipeline issue, too, even if it is not immediately obvious.

What’s the fuss about? President Vladimir Putin sent a shudder through Europe by his decision last Sunday to shut off gas supplies to Ukraine, which has led to temporary shortages across the continent.

Though supplies have now resumed after a face-saving deal was struck yesterday, the reaction across the European Union, which depends on Russia for 25% of its gas, was one of alarm. Angela Merkel, the new German chancellor, swiftly warned that relations with Moscow could be damaged.

Russia’s status as Europe’s largest source of energy gives Mr. Putin the power to blackmail his neighbors, but he must be careful not to drive off his most lucrative customers. The shock has already given a huge boost to more secure alternatives – above all nuclear power – and Tony Blair’s call for a more aggressive and concerted European energy policy toward Russia has already been vindicated.

The ravaged features of Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, who was poisoned by his post-communist rivals, are a reminder of the stakes in this dispute. Pro-Western Ukrainians are convinced the Kremlin was behind not only the poison plot but also the rigged elections that sparked the Orange Revolution two years ago.

The tensions between Russia and Ukraine go back long before the change of regime, however. A millennium ago, Kiev – not Moscow – was the cultural center of the land that later became known as Russia. But the very name “Ukraine,” which means “borderland,” gives a clue to its subsequent fate. For centuries, Mongols, Lithuanians, Poles, Turks and Cossacks fought over the “granary of Europe,” before the Empress Catherine the Great finally secured the region for Russia.

Tsarist rule did not mean Ukraine became a more civilized place. The first modern anti-Semitic pogroms took place in Odessa in the 1870s, to be followed by many more, though the worst took place after the Bolshevik revolution. For a few months, Ukrainian independence was a tantalizing possibility, before the land succumbed to marauding armies of Reds, Whites, Germans, Poles, and Cossacks. At least 1.5 million Ukrainians died in the civil war, a third of them Jewish.

Of all the catastrophes to befall Ukraine, the worst was Stalin. His campaign of expropriation and mass murder against the “kulaks” (richer peasants) killed some 6.5 million. It was followed by the deliberate starvation of 1932-33, the so-called Ukrainian Famine, in which 7 million more perished. Notoriously, Walter Duranty of the New York Times reported that the famine was “exaggeration or malignant propaganda”. Even after he had seen the starvation first hand, he suppressed the news. That did not stop him winning the Pulitzer.

The Second World War laid waste what was left of Ukraine, as the country was fought over for the third time in a generation. It was there, too, that the Holocaust began in earnest, when the Kievan Jews were massacred by the SS and Ukrainian militia at Babiy Yar. By the time the Germans retreated in 1944, 2.25 million Ukrainian Jews were dead. As the extradition of Ivan Demjanjuk has just reminded us again, the Germans had plenty of willing Ukrainians to help them. But another 3 million Ukrainians were killed by both sides in the war. Before and after the German invasion, Stalin deported millions more, including entire ethnic groups such as the Crimean Tatars and the Chechens, many of whom did not survive. Altogether, perhaps one in three Ukrainians was murdered during 70 years of Soviet rule.

The latest of Ukraine’s many ordeals came in 1986 when the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded. The long-term health consequences are still unclear, but the political fallout was an irreversible demand for independence, which was finally declared in August 1991 during the coup that finished off the Soviet Union.

After so much suffering at the hands of the Russians, it is no surprise that Ukraine has sought salvation with the West. But the European Union is not ready to admit Ukraine, a vast and unstable country of over 50 million, and may never do so.

There are influential British voices that do not support Ukraine’s existence as a separate state. On Tuesday, the distinguished British historian Norman Stone, writing in the conservative Daily Telegraph, dismissed the Orange Revolution as a “coup” and concluded: “Europe needs a functioning Russia much more than a semi-functioning Ukraine.”

I have known Norman for nearly 30 years, and his cynical tone of realpolitik should be taken with a double Scotch. The professor prefers the old continental empires – Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanov – to the anarchy of nationalisms and ideologies that replaced them after 1918.

Woodrow Wilson’s principle of national self-determination wasn’t the last word in worldly wisdom. However, Russia’s reversion to a police state under Mr. Putin means that siding with his big battalions against Ukraine implies also reverting to a pre-September 11 world, in which the West thought it could afford not to promote democracy. Even if it were morally defensible to allow Ukraine to be drawn back into the Russian orbit, it would be fatal to our cause in the Middle East.

When I said that there was a human side to all this, I didn’t have history in mind, but something more banal. The board of Gazprom, the Russian state-owned energy company that supplies gas to the West, has recently welcomed a new member: Gerhard Schroder. Why, one may ask, would Mr. Putin want a former German chancellor on the board?

The answer is that the Russian president owes Mr. Schroder quite a debt. Not only did Germany throw its considerable weight behind Mr. Putin’s brutal regime, but it was during the period when Mr. Schroder’s Red-Green coalition was in office that Germany abandoned nuclear power and left itself at the mercy of the Kremlin for 40% of its gas supplies.

So Russophile was Mr. Schroder’s policy, indeed, that the German parliament has begun a corruption inquiry into his acceptance of a lucrative post from Gazprom soon after leaving office. An outsider might be forgiven for supposing that the leader of the world’s third largest economy had been in the pocket of the former KGB colonel who runs the Kremlin. If Mr. Schroder’s conduct wasn’t corrupt, it certainly looks squalid. But I’d bet my bottom ruble that the inquiry will get nowhere. Europe’s nomenklatura have always looked after their own.