Sometimes an era ends with a succinct sentence in a press release. “OMV now has no supply contracts with Gazprom Export and no longer has any business activities in Russia,” the Austrian company said in a statement last week. You have a long-term gas supply contract Gazprom quit.

Of course, it was no surprise that this winter, almost three years after the great Russian attack on the Ukraineeven the long liaison between OMV and the Russians ends. Gazprom has stopped supplying gas to OMV for a month. The reason: The Austrian company had previously stopped payments to the Russians after an arbitration court awarded it 230 million euros in damages for delivery failures. Regardless of this, a transit contract through Ukraine expires at the end of the year, and from January 1st, Russian gas will probably no longer arrive at the Baumgarten junction in Lower Austria anyway. But: For a long time, OMV did not reveal what strategy it was pursuing against the Russians. Get out or sit it out? Other companies in the EU, such as the German energy supplier Uniper or the Finnish gas company Gasum, had broken away from Gazprom much earlier.