 Starting 1 January 2007 Gazprom increased natural gas prices to Georgia following an international incident in an alleged effort to strongly influence the Georgian leadership's defiance of Moscow.The current price is US$235 per thousand cubic meters, which is the highest among the CIS countries.The August 2008 military conflict between Georgia and Russia over the autonomous region of South Ossetia, which has been de facto independent from Georgia since the early 1990s, is likely to shift the balance of power between the main players involved in the formation of the future of the Caspian and Central Asian energy sector, including