Is the EU finally coming to its senses on Russian energy?

“All that is solid melts into air,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously proclaimed almost 180 years ago. Their Communist Manifesto was published against the backdrop of the European revolutions of 1848. But they should have seen 2025 – we are beginning to witness a mighty melting of what is un-solid about EU-NATO Europe. 

This time, the backdrop is not (yet) a typical revolution – street fighting, barricades, and all. But there are two historic events that, in their combined geopolitical impact, will be revolutionary, though they have been anything but unforeseeable. These are, in order of importance, Russia’s defeat of the West in Ukraine, and America’s doubling down on Trumpism.

The two developments have made the sands on which the EU-NATO Europeans have built their rickety policy edifice not merely shift but cave in. Relentless obedience to Washington has always been self-damaging, but now a reckoning is at hand with accumulating self-harm reaching a tipping point into self-destruction.  

It is true, on the surface, that EU-NATO Europe is still digging in its heels. The EU has just produced its umpteenth renewal of sweeping – and constantly increasing – sanctions against Russia. A faction of ten among its member countries are shouting for even more. A top energy official of the European Commission is in Washington to explore ways in which the Europeans can give in, again, to ever-increasing US pressure and buy even more ruinously expensive liquefied natural gas (LNG) from their great insatiable “ally.” 

Yet some, even among Europe’s current elites, are still capable of intuiting that things are so desperate that they must, finally, question even apparent axioms. As the Financial Times has just reported, there are voices, including from EU heavyweight countries such as Germany, that dare think about the unthinkable, namely returning to openly buying inexpensive fossil fuel energy from Russia. In a less topsy-turvy world, the EU should, of course, never have stopped doing so. But as it is, one aspect of Western economic warfare against Russia was the EU’s declared – if non-binding, nota bene – intention to completely abandon its best source of cheap energy by 2027. 

Not that this plan has really worked. In reality, the results have been mixed. Yes, the EU has managed to make its energy supply more expensive, so that its industry is struggling to remain globally competitive, with gas costs “typically three to four times higher than in the US.” But no, the EU has not, actually, been able to ween itself off Russian energy. Instead, Moscow, according to Bloomberg, remains one of the EU’s “top gas providers.” Indeed, 2024 has just seen record imports of LNG from Russia.

It is, of course, more expensive that way than by pipeline. The (still) legal but oddly underhanded way of buying and consuming this LNG stokes tension inside the EU, but that’s apparently the way its elites prefer their commerce and politics – inconsistent, unusually dishonest, a tad absurd, and held together only by a thick glue made of foul compromises and bad blood all around. 

In a broader perspective, EU-NATO Europe’s current, self-inflicted energy fiasco is, of course, only one aspect of its fundamentally unsound (polite expression) decision to obediently and even fanatically join the American proxy war against Russia via Ukraine.

Since then, nothing has worked out as expected. The Ukrainian Army was beefed up with Western arms, training, intelligence, mercenaries, and “advisers” to become the West’s strongest anti-Russian proxy in history. In that shape, it was supposed to inflict a military defeat on Moscow. Yet it is Ukraine now that is struggling to survive on an increasingly desperate defensive, as even the Washington Post has recently admitted (while still, obstinately, calling for more war).

Western economic warfare strategists, meanwhile, boasted that they would not just impede but ruin Russia. Yet now its economy (estimated GDP growth in 2024 of between 3.8% and 4%) is doing better than that of the EU heavyweights France (0.8%) and Germany (no growth, instead minus 0.2%), as well as the EU as a whole (0.9%). Spain, it is true, is an outlier in Western Europe (with 3.2%) but this being an exception is the point. Its success, the Wall Street Journal reports, depends on mass tourism and the use of so much migrant labor that, without immigration, Spain’s population would be shrinking. Good luck, Germany (for instance), with replicating that recipe…

In addition, Western international clout would, so Western elites made themselves believe just a few years ago, compel everyone else on Planet Earth to isolate Russia. Yet now it is the West that looks lonely. First, most of the world refused to freeze out Russia, and then the West’s ongoing massive complicity in Israel’s genocidal ethnic-cleansing attack on the Palestinians shredded the last sorry remnants of the West’s Orwellian claim to global leadership based on “value” and “rules” superiority.

As for Moscow, it’s doing just fine, quietly – and not so quietly – admired by the Global South for standing its ground against sanctions that have harmed the interests of nations of that region too, while building out Moscow’s multilateral relationships in associations such as BRICS and with partners such as North Korea and Iran, and deepening its de facto alliance with China. 

The West also deployed international law, for what it’s worth, in transparently political moves to serve as a geopolitical weapon against Russia’s leadership. Yet, especially after the West’s brutal refusal to heed elementary legal and ethical norms regarding Israel’s outrageous war crimes and crimes against humanity, the entire world can see that the true heart of lawless darkness is the West itself. 

All of this, particularly a humiliating military setback and economic collapse, was intended to bring about “regime change” in Moscow. That may have been violent, certainly unconstitutional, replacing a government resisting the West and helping others to do the same. That also failed to happen. Instead, the Russian government is solidly in control, and, if anything, the population’s support has only increased.

In sum, nothing, really nothing the elites of EU-NATO Europe have undertaken with regard to Russia and the war in Ukraine has worked out even remotely. Western European leaders are now looking at pure disaster. And most of it is their own fault in the simple sense that they have made decisions – repeatedly – that brought them to this impasse, even though they had alternatives.

The significance of even faint noises from within the EU blob indicating that there are some politicians and bureaucrats left – beyond Hungary and Slovakia – that are at least able to register that they need to change their approach is hard to assess. Will we look back one day and see today’s reports about anonymous and heavily resisted thought experiments about returning to normal energy trade with Russia as the beginning of a more general sea change? A real and healthy transformation in which Europe would have to rebalance fundamentally by finally emancipating itself from its American “ally from hell” while re-establishing a normal relationship with Russia and China, too?

That, alas, still seems unlikely. But then, history does not follow a straight, easily predictable line. Instead, it moves in leaps, bounds, and some very harsh bumps, too. Maybe there’s hope in that.