How much Russian oil and gas is Europe still importing?

In its effort to support Ukraine, Europe has sent money, tanks, drones, missiles and more. But what if I told you that three and a half years into the war, the countries of the EU are still paying £1 billion a month into the Russian war effort?

I am talking, of course, about energy, a Russian export that is still, many months after a December 2022 oil embargo, being snapped up by some European nations. This has not gone unnoticed by President Trump. “They’re funding the war against themselves,” he told the UN last week. “Who the hell ever heard of that one?”

Why has Europe found it so difficult to wean itself off Russian fuel? When Ukraine was invaded in February 2022, about 25 million tonnes of Russian oil, gas and coal was being imported into EU countries each month.That amount has since been cut by nine-tenths. But the purchases that continue to be made — mostly gas — amounted to £965 million of sales in August and more than £16.8 billion over the past year. Why?

When the crude oil embargo came into force, two countries were given indefinite exemptions: Hungary and Slovakia. Both nations continue to get Russian crude oil via the Druzhba pipeline and have consistently argued that they do not have the capacity to switch to the Adria pipeline (which delivers oil from Croatia).

In reality, notes Luke Wickenden, of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), which has provided all of the figures by analysing shipment data, there is another likely factor: in 2024 getting oil from Russia was about 20 per cent cheaper than from Croatia.

But crude oil makes up a small share of EU imports from Russia: most of it is natural gas. Perhaps surprisingly, the biggest Russian gas importers in Europe over the past year have been not just Slovakia (1.8 million tonnes) and Hungary (4.4 million), but Spain (3.3 million), Belgium (3.8 million) and France (6.7 million). The French government has repeatedly claimed it is locked into long-term contracts that are hard to break without an EU-level ban. Changing sources of fossil fuels takes time, particularly as governments want to shield the energy bills of their citizens. But this sluggishness also means that since the start of the Ukraine war, most EU nations — 17 of the 27 — have actually paid more into the Russian economy for oil and gas than they have sent in military and financial aid to Ukraine.

The EU has announced that all gas imports will be phased out by the end of 2027. But even as the European share of imports has decreased, other countries have stepped in. Turkey, ostensibly a Nato ally, has nonetheless imported £96 billion of fossil fuels from Russia since March 2022. Russian oil and gas companies are also making considerably more money from China and India than they used to.
The result is that even though Russia no longer gets a good price for its oil and gas, the total amount it exports has barely changed in four years.

The above data, which tracks direct imports and exports, does not even give us the full picture of Russia’s surprisingly persistent ability to sell its wares. Energy will sometimes change hands several times, sold and resold between countries. Germany made a big deal of weaning itself off its Nord Stream gas but still imports a sizeable amount of Russian gas second hand via France.

Oil and gas become harder to track after processing, and this, unfortunately, is where Britain comes in. The UK was one of the first European countries to stop importing Russian oil and gas directly in 2022. Yet according to the CREA, since the Ukraine invasion, we have imported about £3 billion of oil products, mostly jet fuel, that have been refined in India and Turkey, made from (you guessed it) Russian oil. Unlike other European countries, Britain has not yet closed this loophole that allows Russian oil to be effectively imported second hand. The result, the CREA estimates, is that Britain has indirectly contributed about £510 million to the Kremlin.

And even if other countries have funded more of the Russian war effort, another stat makes for uncomfortable reading. The UK’s shipping and insurance industries play an outsize role in global trade, and that includes the trade of Russian fuel. Since the invasion, 76 per cent of Russia’s liquified natural gas exports have been carried on UK-owned or UK-insured ships.

European governments may like to suggest there is an iron curtain between them and Russia, and that support for Ukraine is unequivocal across the continent. But scratch beneath the surface and the Russian military machine is, through global supply chains, still more interlinked with the West than many would like to admit. On this, Trump may have a point.