During his first address to Congress as U.S. President on March 4, Donald Trump stated, “Europe has sadly spent more money buying Russian oil and gas than they have spent on defending Ukraine.”
While Trump is not typically known for his statistical accuracy, in this instance, he may have a point.
A report released on Thursday by Ember, an energy think tank, estimates that European purchases of Russian gas totaled 21.9 billion euros ($23.6 billion) last year, compared to 18.7 billion euros ($20.17 billion) in financial aid to Ukraine.
This figure does not include military aid.
The European Union estimates it has disbursed or committed $194 billion in military, financial, and reconstruction aid to Ukraine since the war began.
Ember expressed concern that, far from publishing a promised plan to phase out Russian gas completely by 2027, the EU increased its imports of Russian gas by 18 percent last year.
“The EU needs to move away from pricey and volatile fossil gas to meet its own security, economic, and climate objectives, starting with a clear pathway for the Russian gas phase-out,” Ember wrote.
Vladyslav Vlasiuk, a Ukrainian presidential adviser, told EU ambassadors in Kyiv in January that Ukraine was upset by EU gas imports from Russia last year.
“It’s time to cut off the petrodollar flow fueling Russia’s aggression,” he said.
Yiannis Bassias, a hydrocarbon industry veteran and energy analyst at Amphorenergy, told Al Jazeera, “It’s true that Europe increased imports of Russian gas in 2023 and 2024, and it will import even more in 2025 because the U.S. cannot provide more.”
“Russian gas [consumption in Europe] in 2024 was about 45 billion cubic meters (bcm), and U.S. gas was 57 bcm.”
Diminishing Russian Energy Sales to Europe
The broader context is that the EU has significantly reduced energy imports from Russia since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
At its peak in 2019, Russian gas supply to Europe amounted to 179 bcm, according to a new report by the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies (OIES) released on Wednesday.
In the year before Russia invaded Ukraine, Europe bought 142 bcm of Russian gas.
“As a direct consequence of factors linked to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that volume fell to just 31 bcm in 2024,” the OIES report stated, and “could be as low as 16-18 bcm in 2025.”
This decline is because all Russian gas used to be supplied through pipelines that are now defunct.
Unknown actors blew up the twin Nord Stream I pipelines and one of the twin Nord Stream II pipelines in September 2022. Together, the four pipelines had been designed to carry 110 bcm of gas annually to Europe.
Another 33 bcm of Russian gas could have entered Europe through the Yamal pipeline, which runs across Belarus and Poland, but Russia stopped all gas flow by May 2022 – a move likely planned a year earlier, according to OIES – and Poland banned further gas imports from Russia across its territory.
A further 65 bcm of Russian gas imports were possible through a pair of pipelines running across Ukraine, but when a five-year transit contract expired last December, Ukraine did not renew it, and the pipelines were idled.
The only remaining Russian gas pipeline is TurkStream, which makes landfall in Eastern Thrace and proceeds through Bulgaria and Serbia to Hungary, but its capacity is limited to 20 bcm annually at the Bulgarian border, the point where it enters the EU.
“The big debate within the industry at present is whether, if there is a ceasefire or peace, we are going to see a return of Russian pipeline gas and a relaxation of sanctions on Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG),” OIES director Jonathan Stern told Al Jazeera.
The report suggests that it will not be quick or easy, as pipeline operators now have to be bailed out of bankruptcy, repairs and maintenance have to be carried out, mutual sanctions rescinded, and a number of breach-of-contract claims involving hundreds of millions of dollars resolved through arbitration.
The EU has similarly tried to divest itself of Russian oil, but results have been mixed.
It imported 88.4 million tonnes of oil from Russia in 2022 before sanctioning it in December of that year.
Official EU imports of Russian oil had fallen by 90 percent by the end of last year, according to the European statistical service, but this is likely misleading because there have also been illicit imports, two-thirds of which were delivered by a Russian shadow fleet.
The Kyiv School of Economics estimated that Russia made $189 billion through sales of crude oil and refined petroleum products last year, up from $178 billion in 2023.
Good Politics Versus Good Economics
Ember believes EU choices make for bad economics.
It estimates that if all announced investments in gas import terminals and pipelines happen, the EU will have a gas surplus of 131 bcm by 2030.
This, it says, saps Europe of money to transform grids and transition to renewable energy, and exposes it to price volatility and uncertain supply, because Europe imports almost all its hydrocarbons.
Stern disagreed with Ember.
Asked if gas was a dead-end investment by 2030, he said, “No – and nor do most governments or the European Commission [think so], otherwise they wouldn’t still be spending money on new infrastructure. If you change the date to 2050, the answer may be different.”
Others believed EU choices were primarily about good politics rather than economics.
Bassias believed that “the big thing for the U.S. and Russia is to open navigational routes in the Arctic and to do joint oil and gas exploration there.”
They were “tacitly cooperating under Biden, and it’s official now,” he said, suggesting the Ukraine war got in the way of that cooperation.
Energy analyst Miltiadis Aslanoglou agreed that “if one wanted to be strict about [energy imports], one could be.”
“Europe has sent Russia the message it wanted to send – that ‘we do not depend on you.’ To take its gas trade to zero is very difficult [diplomatically], because, for better or worse, Russia will always be there, it will always be a neighbor. So Europe keeps a door open,” Aslanoglou told Al Jazeera.
He suggested Europe was keeping the once-mighty Russian gas giant Gazprom on life support.
“Gazprom is certainly not the trillion-dollar company it was five years ago, and no one even knows whether it will even exist in another five years,” Aslanoglou said. “Right now, [it] is in dire financial straits. They can barely maintain the pipeline network within Russia, which is 50 or 60 years old.”
Realism Versus Values
Ukraine has a different view.
Its long-range drone strikes inside Russia since last September suggest a policy shift from striking ammunition depots to one of choking off Russian export revenues from gas, oil, and refined petroleum products, according to analysis from the Ukrainian group Frontelligence Insight.
Ukraine has tried to kill Gazprom twice this year, sending attack drones to destroy the Russkaya compressor, which pressurizes gas in Russia’s one remaining pipeline to Europe, TurkStream.
Russia said it downed nine drones near the compressor in Russia’s Krasnodar region on January 13 and another three drones on March 1.
Ukraine also tried to cut off Russia’s crude oil offloading terminal at Novorossiysk in the Black Sea on February 17 and succeeded in damaging it.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s prioritization of a ceasefire in the Black Sea this week likely aimed to forestall any further Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s main economic lifeline.
Ukraine appears not to be the only loser in a “good politics” scenario with Russia.
The International Energy Agency’s Global Energy Review on Monday found that the world’s decarbonization efforts, in which Europe has played a leading role, were beginning to show real results.
Although world energy demand rose by 2.2 percent last year, emissions only rose by 0.8 percent, the IEA said, because renewable energy capacity increased by 700 GW – a 22nd straight annual record in new installed capacity.
This, the IEA said, proved that “growth in energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions continues to decouple from global economic growth.”
Ember’s message was similar. Unlike Russia and the United States, Europe is hydrocarbon-poor.
According to Eurostat, dependence on imported hydrocarbons meant it produced only 37 percent of its total energy needs last year.
Ember believed a paradigm shift to clean energy technology would not only save Ukraine from Russia but could also save Europe from climate change.
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