Russia also damaged itself in American eyes by renationalising the Yukos oil company.
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Will it treat fairly the minority shareholders of the Yukos oil company?
Russia's largest oil company, Rosneft, which took over the assets of the Yukos oil company, is still open to lawsuits from Yukos's shareholders.
In 2003, the authorities arrested Yukos oil company chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia's richest man, for what many believe to have been his political threat to Putin.
And although the latest conflict was triggered by Georgia, the deeper roots of Russia's invasion lie in domestic events that go back as far as 2003-04: the destruction of the Yukos oil company, and Russia's perception of the colour revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine as a Western plot to undermine its sovereignty.
The government's attack on the Yukos oil company and its erstwhile boss, Mikhail Khodorkovsky whose trial verdict was last week conveniently postponed so as to come after Mr Putin's Victory Day parades has demonstrated with an awful clarity both the lack of any independent rule of law and the arbitrariness of the Russian state's intervention in business.
Observers noted similarities with the tactics that eventually sank Yukos, an oil company which underwent a lengthy campaign of state harassment.
In April the government said it would let Yukos, an oil company, build a pipeline from the oilfields near Angarsk, said to be as big as Kuwait's, to Daqing in China.
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And if, alternatively, Menatep were to step in as a guarantor for Yukos's debts, says Adam Landes at Renaissance, the government would only be able to grab Menatep's shares in Yukos if the oil company did go bankrupt.
Arriving at a meeting at the Kremlin wearing a polo-neck sweater instead of a shirt and tie is rumoured to have been one of the reasons why Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Yukos, his oil company, were destroyed by the government.
Or the Kremlin may have been alarmed by talk of a deal between Yukos and a big American oil company, after the planned (now cancelled) merger of Yukos with Sibneft, another oil firm controlled by Roman Abramovich, the owner of London's Chelsea Football Club.
Nor is Yukos the only Russian oil company under the spotlight for allegedly failing to pay taxes.
Meanwhile, Yukos, a Russian oil company, is positioning itself to buy generating capacity, and thus ensure control of its electricity supplies.
But Norilsk Nickel, with the world's largest reserves of the metal, treads in the shadow of rumors that the government is plotting to target it as it did Mikhail Khodorkovsky's oil company Yukos.
The Kremlin may also have feared a mooted deal between Yukos and a big American oil company.
Together with widespread corruption, this has allowed him to jail potential opponents like the oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, confiscating his assets which included the oil company, Yukos.
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The final one was the long-running investigation into Yukos, Russia's largest oil company.
It did not freeze the assets of Yukos' Sterzhevskiy oil refinery, Caspian Oil Company, or its controlling stake in Mazeikiai Nafta, Lithuania's sole refinery which Russia's biggest oil firm, Lukoil, wants to buy.
Norilsk's motives are also fairly clear: Mr Potanin would like to get a foothold outside Russia in case the government there decides to bully metals producers as it has done Yukos, the country's largest oil company.
Lukoil has been trying to catch up with its smaller rival, Yukos, considered the country's most westernised oil company.
The other main shareholders in Group Menatep, the main owner of Yukos, have fled the country, and Yukos's takeover of Sibneft, another big oil company, has fallen apart.
Rosneft, a state-owned oil company that now owns Yugansk, is suing Yukos over Yugansk's own back-taxes (already paid, says Yukos), and other issues.
Running an oil company is not easy, and the boss of Yukos, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a chemical engineer by training, has shown something of a flair for it.
Earlier, Rosneft, another state-controlled oil firm, acquired the main production operation of Yukos, a private energy company that had been dismembered by Russia's state.
In the case of Yukos, which is a holding company, the main assets are shares in the subsidiaries which own oil licences, drilling equipment and so on.
Its three main subsidiaries, which produce the oil and also hold most of Yukos's cash, could keep running for a while even with the parent company disabled, but not indefinitely: they have already cut investments to a bare minimum.
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