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Europe Somehow Still Depends on Russia’s Energy.
Russia’s brutal, illegal war on Ukraine is lumbering into its fourth year, yet Europe still hasn’t used all its leverage against Moscow. Despite far-reaching cutbacks that have transformed global energy markets—and the European Union’s pledge to terminate all energy deals with Russia by 2027—the continent still maintains multifarious links to the Russian energy sector. Several European countries have failed to completely sever their energy ties to Russia, and the notoriously pro-Russian governments of Hungary and Slovakia are among them—but they are not alone. In 2024, only Slovakia deposited more into Russian accounts for fossil fuels than France, followed by Hungary, Austria, and Spain.
A December report from the Center for the Study of Democracy (CSD) concluded, “Although Russian fossil fuel exports to the West have decreased, glaring loopholes in the sanctions’ regime persist.” Nowhere are the failings more prominent than with liquified natural gas (LNG). In 2024, the EU imported a record 16.5 million metric tons of LNG from Russia, surpassing the 15.2 million in 2023.
EU countries, led by Germany, have done much to truncate their Russian energy dependencies. Between early 2022 and the end of 2023, the EU slashed its imports of Russian fossil fuels by 94 percent, from $16 billion per month to around $1 billion per month, according to Belgian think tank Bruegel. Coal imports are nil. But countries across the bloc are still buying energy supplies from Russia and thus paying straight into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war chest.
When it comes to Russian LNG, which is not sanctioned and remains a bargain compared to imported U.S. super-chilled gas, Europe has even regressed. According to the Financial Times, EU countries’ imports from Russia—led by France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Belgium—reached an all-time high in 2024.
Russian gas imports are Europe’s most glaring failure, with Russia still making up 18 percent of all EU natural gas imports as of late 2024. In 2022, it was Russia—not the Europeans—that scaled back gas imports. It was, namely, to penalize Europe for its refusal to pay in rubles, which caused exports to the EU to fall by over half over the course of that year. By 2024, the share of Russia’s pipeline gas in EU imports dropped to about 8% of its 2021 total as Germany and other countries found new markets. But Russian gas continued to flow into the EU—through Ukrainian pipelines—with some of the best customers being Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, Greece, and Italy.
(foreign policy)