The European Council has voted to ban the imports of Russian gas, theoretically ending the years-long situation in which the continent has sent more cash to Moscow than Kyiv, but with so many exemptions, the energy will likely flow for years to come.
The European Council overrode the concerns of Hungary, Slovakia, and Bulgaria — who remain more dependent on Russian energy imports than their European neighbours due to geographic and historic circumstances — to sign off on a ban on Russian gas on Monday. The European Commission has insisted there is no risk to Europe’s security of supply, and cutting Russia out of the natural gas supply picture completely won’t lead to higher prices for consumers; however, the transition to zero Russian gas will be postponed for years to smooth the transition.
This so-called “stepwise approach” will “limit the impact on prices and markets”, the European Council claimed, and will begin with a ban on Russian Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) in January 2027. The ban on regular pipeline-supplied natural gas is not due to come into effect until the Autumn of 2027, and further exceptions for landlocked European countries, which have less access to global gas markets, will allow them to still buy Russian gas until January 2028.
Indeed, there is even a “safeguard” measure in the law, reports Die Welt, which means that if a European country ever finds its energy supply seriously threatened and declares a state of emergency, it can ignore the ban and buy Russian gas as a last resort, regardless.
Pushing the restrictions so far into the future opens the possibility that Europe’s bid to cut Russia out won’t come until after the Ukraine War may have been resolved by the peace-finding efforts of the United States. Unlike the sanctions regime, which needs to be frequently renewed and will likely lapse once the Ukraine war is over, the energy bans signed this week are intended to be permanent, preventing Europe from ever re-integrating with cheap Russian energy in a post-war world.
To enforce the ban when it eventually comes into effect, the European Union will require its member states to “verify the country where gas was produced” before importing it. Per the Council — a collection of the heads of government of every EU member state — the penalties for breaking the new energy regime will be:
…at least 3.5% of their total worldwide annual turnover, €40 million or 300% of the estimated transaction turnover. For private individuals, the maximum fine should not be lower than €2.5 million. The member states will have two years to implement these penalties in their national law.
While Europe’s consumption of Russian natural gas has fallen considerably since Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, due to both sanctions and the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline, which reduced overall carrying capacity, Russian gas still accounts for 13 per cent of Europe’s imports.
In recent years, Europe has come in for major criticism for sending vast quantities of money to Russia in energy payments while talking tough on the Ukraine war in public. President of the United States Donald Trump said in 2025: “Europe has sadly spent more money buying Russian oil and gas than they have spent on defending Ukraine — by far”. Russian state energy companies claimed after the invasion — albiet before the Nord Stream bombing — that they were selling more energy to Europe than usual, and even when the continent backed off on natural gas deliveries, LNG buys rose to compensate.
As reported in 2025: “European nations spent $23 billion buying Russian fuel in 2024, compared to $19.6 billion in foreign aid provided to Ukraine. EU spending on Russian fuel was down six per cent from the previous year, but this was largely due to falling prices, since the volume of Russian product imported by the EU was only down by one per cent.” According to the European Union, purchases of Russian gas fell to €15 billion by 2025.
The ban was not voted through unanimously, and the European Union relied on a “reinforced majority” to pass the measure, in the latest instance of the bloc overriding the concerns of smaller member states. Hungary and Slovakia both voted against the measure while Bulgaria abstained. Hungary and Slovakia are landlocked central European countries that can’t easily import American LNG, for instance, which has helped sustain the rest of Europe during the transition away from Russian energy dominance.
For Europe’s hard left, the ban doesn’t go far enough as it doesn’t ban Europe from burning natural gas altogether, and in their view, takes Europe from the frying pan of tyrant Putin to the fire of dependence on tyrant Trump. The continent should be powered by “homegrown renewable energy” instead, they said.
While Russian oil and gas have dominated the discussion of Moscow’s influence in Europe in recent years, they are not the only areas where Russia is dominant in the energy market. Remarkably, per Reuters, the European Union also wants to tackle these, including eventually banning European countries from Russian nuclear fuel.
This would be no small feat: Russia dominates the global nuclear fuel market and has done so for decades, a deliberate policy by the United States. As previously reported:
…Russia also has a considerable stake in the nuclear energy field itself, having emerged from the Cold War as the world’s largest supplier of uranium for nuclear power plants.
This was by design, a bid to give Russia’s post-Soviet economy a chance to find a meaningful niche in the world economy, with the United States leading Russia into the ‘Megatons to Megawatts‘ programme, which saw Moscow convert decommissioned nuclear missiles into civil fuel. This cheap Russian nuclear fuel flooded the global market for decades, making Russia the dominant market player and confounding attempts by undercut Western companies to improve their market share.
Russian dominance in uranium has led to an awkward situation in Western Ukraine War sanctions, where Moscow gas and oil is heavily punished while Moscow nuclear is given a free pass.
Having long undercut any competition in the field of nuclear fuel, there are not many competitors to Russia waiting in the wings as nations withdrew from the enrichment game as an uneconomic boondoggle. Several European countries have considerable uranium deposits that could be mined, and the world’s second-largest uranium enrichment company, after Russia’s Rosatom, is headquartered in the United Kingdom, but in other cases, this would be a new industry effectively starting from scratch.
Spain also has one of the largest natural deposits of Uranium, and had a major civil nuclear and nuclear weapons programme under General Franco. But this was shut down after the socialists came to power in the 1980s, and the country’s anti-nuclear left-wing government is now in the process of closing down its remaining power stations with no plans to build more.
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