Four weeks after the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, the Strait of Hormuz remains commercially dead. Shipping intelligence firm Kpler puts the traffic collapse at 90 percent. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has turned the waterway into a toll booth, charging up to $2m [€1.75m] per vessel while Iranian lawmakers move to legislate the fees into permanence.
On Saturday (29 March), the Houthis entered the war by firing missiles at Israel, raising the spectre of a second chokepoint closure at Bab al-Mandab.
European gas prices are up 70 percent this month.
The IEA has released 400 million barrels from strategic reserves, the largest draw in its history. Oil analysts warn that if Hormuz stays shut past mid-April, the disruption gets dramatically worse.
This is the real crisis.
But Europe is also waging an energy crisis of its own making — and this one requires no drones, no insurance repricing, and no warships.
A price dispute dressed as an emergency
Since January, Hungary and Slovakia have treated the Druzhba pipeline shutdown as an existential emergency.
A Russian drone damaged the Brody pumping station on 27 January, halting Russian crude deliveries to their refineries.
What followed was not an emergency response. It was a political escalation: vetoes on EU sanctions and a €90bn Ukraine aid loan, emergency electricity cut-off threats to Ukraine during winter, threats to suspend gas supplies.
The problem is that Brussels checked the numbers in late February and found no supply emergency.
Croatia’s Adria pipeline can fully replace Druzhba volumes. Seaborne crude began arriving at the Croatian port of Omišalj in early March.
Both governments have meanwhile been feeding their refineries from state emergency stockpiles, held at book value, far below the market price that MOL [the state-owned Hungarian oil and gas company] would otherwise pay.
Slovakia’s stocks have fallen below the International Energy Agency (IEA)’s 90-day safety floor. Taxpayer-held emergency oil is being burned through to protect a private refinery’s margins.
The objection from Budapest and Bratislava is straightforward: the Adria route costs three to five times more than Druzhba did.
Slovnaft is engineered for Russian Urals-grade sour crude, and retooling for alternatives takes time. Fair enough. But MOL itself says it expects full refinery loading by April. The engineering challenge is being solved. It is the political mileage that is being prolonged.
No price dispute — however legitimate — justifies vetoing sanctions on the country whose drone destroyed the pipeline.
Yet that is precisely what Fico and Orbán have achieved. The Druzhba standoff has paralysed the EU’s unanimity-dependent foreign policy machinery at the moment it matters most.
And the problem extends well beyond central Europe.
The test Europe is failing
Belgian prime minister Bart De Wever called publicly in mid-March for the EU to “normalise relations with Russia” and restore cheap energy access. EU energy commissioner Dan Jorgensen’s answer was emphatic, even as De Wever backtracked shortly after
But the trade data tells a different story.
A Reuters analysis of CREA figures found that seven EU member states quietly increased the value of their Russian energy purchases last year. France was up 40 percent. The Netherlands 72 percent. In January 2026, nearly every cargo from Russia’s Arctic Yamal terminal sailed to an EU port. Brussels has already shelved its planned April proposal for a permanent Russian oil ban.
The Iran war did not open this crack. It gave governments permission to stop pretending it was closed.
What makes this dangerous is the timing. The Hormuz crisis is a genuine test of Europe’s post-2022 energy architecture. It is the first major supply shock that originates outside the Russian sphere — maritime, systemic, and without an obvious diplomatic fix.
The question it poses is whether diversification toward LNG was real resilience or simply a change of address for the same vulnerability.
That question deserves an honest answer.
What it is getting instead is a political rearguard action in which a commercially disadvantaged pipeline dispute, an opportunistic Belgian trial balloon, and quiet Yamal cargoes combine into something more corrosive than any of them alone: a slow-motion retreat from the commitment Europe made when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Every barrel transits somewhere. Every transit route is someone’s leverage.
The Hormuz closure proves this for hydrocarbons from the Gulf.
The Druzhba dispute proves something worse: that some EU governments will manufacture their own leverage to undermine the solidarity that a real crisis demands.