Russian gas exports via Soviet-era pipelines running through Ukraine came to a halt on New Year’s Day, marking the end of decades of Moscow’s dominance over Europe’s energy markets.’, Reuters reported on 1 January 2025.
To better understand the outcry in some Central and Eastern European landlocked countries following the shutting off the gas transit via Ukraine on 1 January, it is worth looking back a few decades as far as the Cold War.
You may recall the 1987 James Bond movie The Living Daylights starring Timothy Dalton. In this movie, a gadget in a Soviet oil pipeline is used as a plot device to smuggle a KGB defector to the West. In his enourmous travel gadget, the Soviet KGB general can move in the pipeline at a tremendous speed and then successfully cross the East-West border. This pipeline is the Brotherhood gas pipeline, also known as Trans-Siberian pipeline, which delivered Russian gas to Eastern Europe for decades.
It should be noted right away that when the Soviet Union built and put into operation the Friendship (in Russian, Druzhba) oil pipeline in 1964 to supply the demand for oil of the Eastern European socialist countries such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the GDR, it pledged to provide them with cheap oil for decades, which in fact served as the bedrock of the industrial production in these countries.
When the Brotherhood gas pipeline was built almost a decade later, in 1972, cheap Russian gas became available not only to the industrial customers in the CEE countries, but also to household consumers. At that time, however, all parties involved in this deal were happy, given that the benefits for CEE countries far exceeded any concerns or doubts concerning sovereignty (if there were any), while the USSR could extend his dominance. Undoubtably, it was a mutually beneficial deal. The break-up of the Soviet Union and the fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s did not bring any significant change in this area, and Russia was even able to increase its gas supplies to Europe. Troubles emerged when Moscow decided to use energy as a weapon and a tool for pressure.
In almost five decades, the former USSR and Russia have managed to build up a major share of the European gas market, which at its peak stood at around 35%. The turning point has come in 2022, when the EU has slashed its dependence on Russian energy. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, several EU countries have signed agreements on purchasing gas from Norway and LNG from Qatar and the U.S. The last remaining EU buyers of Russian gas via Ukraine, such as Slovakia and Austria, have arranged alternative supply, while Hungary decided to buy Russian gas via the TurkStream pipeline under the Black Sea.
As for the supplies of crude oil, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Northern route of the Russian pipeline to Germany was closed in January 2023. In July 2024, Ukraine stopped the transportation of Lukoil oil through the Friendship pipeline to Slovakia and Hungary.
The end of gas transit through Ukraine to Europe was ’one of Moscow’s biggest defeats’, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on 1 January. At the same time, he urged the U.S. to supply more gas to EU.
According to media sources, with the cancellation of the contract, Russian Gazprom will lose an estimated $5 billion (€4.84 billion) in gas sales, while Ukraine will lose up to $1 billion a year in transit fees from Russia.
Despite the European Commission’s statements regarding the preparedness of the bloc for the cut-off, with the end of the Russia-Ukraine gas deal, some Central Eastern European countries are scrambling to meet their energy needs while consumers across Europe are suffering from high energy prices.
Since it was Ukraine which refused to extend the transit deal with Russia, a question rises: is it really Europe had decided to abandon Russian gas as Ukrainian Energy Minister claimed in a statement or, it it rather a forced energy transformation in Europe, with Ukraine, actively involved and, in accordance with U.S. interests?
In view of all this, one can only wonder how the European Union can allow all this to happen?
This question is particularly legitimate in light of Brussels’ inability to solve the problem of EU’s energy security. Think of the failed Nabucco gas pipeline – named after Giuseppe Verdi’s opera – which was supposed to supply Europe with gas from Azerbaijan, but which, after more than a decade of efforts and, billions of euros having spent, was finally abandoned. Though the Nabucco project has progressed slowly, with the participation of the CEE countries, and Budapest even hosted a major Nabucco Summit in 2009, it remained a drawing board project which was destined to be replaced by South Stream – an alternative Russian pipeline.
In early January, the situation was assessed as so hopeless by Slovak PM Robert Fico, who, despite the fact that his country, just like other states in the CEE region has good interconnector capacities with its neighbours, faces difficulties due to the halt of gas transit through Ukraine threatened Zelenskyy with retaliation: he has suggested halting emergency electricity supplies to Ukraine if no agreement is reached. ’Accepting the unilateral decision of the Ukrainian president is totally irrational and wrong,’ Fico said in a letter to Brussels.
Accepting that energy is part of soft power, what difference does it make in Europe once Russian gas is replaced by LNG from the U.S.? If we look closely at developments in this area these days, there is little difference between the current U.S. ambitions affecting most of Europe and those of the former Soviet Union decades ago in the Central and Eastern part of Europe. (The only difference is that, today, there is no realistic access to non-Russian gas in volumes that could replace Russian imports. In addition, prices of Russian fossil fuels and that of provided by the U.S. and other countries cannot be compared with each other.)
Despite all arguments concerning an increased vulnerability of some Member States due to the cut off of the Russian gas, this new dependency in the field of energy seems to be even pursued by top EU officials, disregarding the geographical location and energy demands of the individual Member States, at a cost that imposes a huge additional burden.
What is this if not betrayal…? Maestro Verdi would be ashamed to see all this.