"It's absurd," says Mr. Grodnikov's brother, Nikolai, who shakes with fear at speaking openly for the first time about the death. "The postmortem showed there wasn't a drop of alcohol in his body."

As Europe wakes up to the Kremlin's stranglehold on its natural gas supplies, a stark light has been shone on how the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, does business with the other independent states that once made up the Soviet Union.

Moscow's demand for Ukraine to pay a fivefold increase for deliveries of Russian gas earlier this month was widely seen as punishment for Kiev's push to join the European Union and NATO since its "orange revolution" last winter.

What is less known is the flip side to this gritty political game: the Kremlin is propping up a despotic pro-Moscow regime on the edge of Europe that only survives because it gets extremely cheap gas from Russia.