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1. Actually, it's the other way round: it's the Ukrainians who pushed for reopening the contract despite it having several years to run. As I explain in one of the diaries linked near the top of my story, that's linked to in-fighting between Ukrainian factions vying to be in control of that "private" (and highly profitable) deal to deliver not-Gazprom gas to Ukraine;
2. Yuschenko never was "Moscow's boy", but he was seen as more pragmatic and less opposed to Russian business interests that Yanukovich (who was clearly the top guy of the Ukrainian industrialists of the East of the country, a group wary of their bigger Russian competitors). Why Putin suddenly decided to drop his neutrality toward Yuschenko to back Yanukovich is a mystery to me - and probably was a mistake.
Note that I am not particularly pro-Russia, just really annoyed at some of the arguments used to bash Russia today, which are highly hypocritical. I am comfortable saying this because I've been criticizing Putin for years, and I had no illusions about his peculiar form of "democracy" before, and i'm not suddenly raising the topic today because I'm unhappy about his hardball, but perfectly legitimate, negotiating stance on gas, like the people I criticize today.
Not only that, but why is it that the Russians have any obligation whatsoever to do anything other than what they wish with their own natural resources? They are a sovereign nation, after all. As such, all decisions over how to dispose over their natural resources ought to be considered completely unilateral from an international law standpoint - and, for those who wish to honor international law in a non-hypocritical standpoint, also from a moral standpoint. (This doesn't apply to treaties or contracts that the Russians may have negotiated qua sovereign country; these need to be honored in order that THEY maintain moral and legal consistency with international law.)