The assumption that Europe could not forsake Russian natural gas did much to inhibit the EU and US’s ability to support Ukraine from the moment of Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. The first months after Russia’s invasion in February 2022 did little to challenge this supposition.
Although Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, promised that the EU would phase out Russian imports by 2027, there were no sanctions on Russian gas exports until December 2023. Emboldened, Vladimir Putin ordered Gazprom, the state-run monopoly, to reduce supply from June 2022, forcing the EU into an emergency plan to cut gas consumption by 15 per cent by March last year.
A year on, the EU has ended the winter season with a record volume of stored gas. Prices, meanwhile, are back to the level before they began to soar in the second half of 2021. Undoubtedly, Europe has benefited from the good fortune of two mild winters, unlike Japan where several power plants have been shut down to avoid gas shortages elsewhere. But much of the continent has foregone pipelined Russian gas and reduced demand by a fifth without anything like the social and political upheaval once feared in European capitals.