Europe is Paying for Putin’s War
While Brussels boasts about collapsing the Russian war economy, European buyers have just handed the Kremlin a record nearly €6 billion for its gas. A commentary by Sir William Browder
For the last few weeks, anyone who supports Ukraine has been able to enjoy a rare pleasure. Night after night, Ukrainian drones have set Russian oil refineries and tankers ablaze. Gas stations across Russia have run dry. Videos show fistfights breaking out in the queues. For a country that likes to present itself as an energy superpower, it is humiliating.
The damage is real. But we should be honest about where Vladimir Putin actually gets his money. It is not from gasoline sold at home. It is from crude oil and natural gas sold to foreign buyers.
Last year those sales poured around €88 billion into the Russian budget. That is the money that pays the soldiers, builds the missiles and keeps the war going.
So if we want to stop the war, this is the target. Cut off the oil and gas revenue and you cut off the war. It really is that simple.
This is where the West is supposed to come in. And, to listen to Brussels, we are doing exactly that.
Last month the European Union rolled out its latest round of sanctions against Russia. It went after the military industrial complex, the banks and the so-called shadow fleet, the ageing tankers Putin uses to dodge the oil price cap. A twenty-first package is already being prepared.
Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, summed up the mood. “Brick by brick,” she said, “we are collapsing the foundations of Russia’s war economy.”
It sounds tough. It sounds serious. There is only one problem. We are talking out of both sides of our mouth.
The energy campaign group Urgewald has just published its analysis of Russian gas imports for the first half of this year.
The findings are staggering. In just six months, the EU bought a record amount of Russian liquefied natural gas. The bill came to almost €5.9 billion. That is an 18 per cent increase on the same period last year. Europe bought up almost the entire output of Russia’s flagship Yamal plant. The biggest buyers were France, Belgium and Spain.
These were not leftover cargoes with nowhere else to go. Shipments from Yamal to Asia collapsed by nearly three quarters over the same period. Europe did not stumble into this. Europe chose it.
Read that again. While European leaders boast about collapsing the Russian war economy brick by brick, European buyers were handing the Kremlin €5.9 billion for its gas. And they were doing it in the very months Russia was raining missiles down on Ukrainian power stations, hospitals and homes.
Think about what that means. We are approving tens of billions of euros in military and financial aid so that Ukraine can fight off the Russian army.
At the very same time, we are sending Russia billions of euros that it uses to fund that same army. We arm the victim with one hand and pay the aggressor with the other. It is not a policy. It is a farce.
It is more shocking still when you look at how Russia treats us in return. Russian jets buzz our airspace. Russian drones cross into Poland and Romania. Russian vessels loiter over the cables that carry our internet and our power in the Baltic.
An incendiary device planted on a cargo flight caught fire at a DHL depot in Birmingham. This is not the behaviour of a trading partner. It is the behaviour of an enemy. And we are paying that enemy for its gas.
There is no clever argument that makes this acceptable. For years we were told that Europe simply could not survive without Russian energy. That excuse has expired. Russian oil now makes up less than 3 per cent of EU imports. Russian gas has been falling for years.
The volumes that remain are a choice, not a necessity. Some governments have decided that slightly cheaper gas is worth more than the lives being lost in Ukraine. They are wrong.
The defenders of the trade will point out that the EU has already agreed to ban Russian LNG. That is true. But the ban does not fully bite until 2027. In the meantime the buying goes on, at record levels, and every cargo is another cheque written to the Kremlin. A ban that arrives after you have handed over billions is not much of a ban.
If we are serious about defending ourselves and serious about supporting Ukraine, there is only one honest course.
The United Kingdom, the European Union and every ally must go cold turkey on Russian oil and gas. Not in 2027. Now. Every barrel and every cargo we refuse to buy is money taken straight out of Putin’s war chest.
We cannot keep talking a good game and then doing the opposite. Ukrainians are dying to hold back an army that we are helping to pay for.
The drones over the Russian refineries show what courage looks like. The least we can do is stop funding the other side.
A previous versions of this article were published by the British daily The Telegraph
IEP Bocconi does not express opinions of its own. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors.
