Despite the war in Ukraine and the many declarations of European leaders, the Russian Federation once again became Europe’s main gas supplier in May, overtaking the United States for the first time in two years. The Financial Times writes this, citing the report of the Independent Commodity Intelligence Service (ICIS) and explaining that the reversal of direction indicates the difficulty of the old continent in reducing its dependence on Russian gas, with several Eastern European and Central European countries depending again from imports from Moscow. According to ICIS data, gas and LNG shipments from Russia last month, despite sanctions, accounted for 15% of total supply to the EU, UK, Switzerland, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and North Macedonia.
In fact, Moscow still continues to guarantee supplies to Europe through the gas pipelines that cross Ukraine and Turkey, while Russian LNG imports had been reported increasing in Europe for some time, especially in France.
Liquefied gas from the United States instead stopped at 14% of the supply to Europe last month, the lowest level since August 2022. According to ICIS analysts the situation should only be contingent since the flows in May are Indeed, they were impacted by several one-time factors, including an outage at a major U.S. LNG export facility. Russia instead sent more gas through Turkey ahead of pipeline maintenance scheduled for June.
In recent days the Reuters news agency had highlighted in May a jump in Gazprom’s supplies to Europe of 39% compared to the same month last year and of over 7% compared to April 2024. However, by the end of the year in progress Moscow will be able to send liquefied gas to Asia via the Northern Sea Route (the Arctic route) and there are those who believe that Russia will be less capable of supplying large quantities to Europe.
“Russia – claims the Reuters report – has limited flexibility to maintain this share in Europe” and the issue will emerge in the winter, when demand increases. Overall LNG production in the United States is increasing, “with new capacity coming to the global market by December.” Furthermore, the transit agreement still in force between Ukraine and Russia will expire at the end of the year (and will not be renewed), putting at risk the gas flows that are now indispensable for several Central European nations.
