Between January 7th and 19th of this year the transit of Russian gas to Europe through the Ukraine was halted. This was the most serious European gas crisis to have happened since the start of Russian gas transmission decades earlier. The effect of the crisis was more severe in our region (and in Hungary in particular) than in the majority of the old Member States of the EU. This is due to Hungary’s dependency on Russian gas imports, which is by far higher than the European average, in addition, the lack or regional storage and interconnection capacity in the affected countries. The effect of the cut-off of gas delivery on consumers was ’fortunately’ mitigated by a significant drop in the nonhousehold gas demand implied by the economic recession. Last December’s weather, which was milder than the average resulted in an oversupply of storage capacities in the European market during the crisis. Under less favourable conditions, or if the crisis had lasted longer, a similar crisis would have affected consumers much more drastically than in January. Since the implementation of the 10 years long Russian–Ukrainian agreement, closing the January crisis, is doubtful, the affected countries have to prepare for the management of similar crises in the future. Therefore we have looked for the answer to the question, what are the key factors for successfully managing a gas crisis. For the answer we have studied the experience of ten countries of our region in the January 2009 gas crisis.