Commentary: With Russian gas pipelines to Europe turned off, the political claws are coming out

BIRMINGHAM: On Dec 31, 2024, the last contract that the Russian energy giant Gazprom had for the overland supply of natural gas to Europe came to an end. This was the result of Ukraine refusing to renew the transit contract that had been in place since 2019 and contributed around US$5 billion to Gazprom’s annual revenue.

Given that Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, this was not an unreasonable decision for the government in Kyiv to take. Nor was it unpredictable - already in the summer of 2023, Ukraine had indicated that it had no intention to extend the contract with Gazprom.

By the time the contract came to an end, the dependency of the European Union on Russia for gas had been reduced from its peak above 40 per cent just before the beginning of the Russian aggression against Ukraine to below 10 per cent. And only around half of that came via Ukraine. The EU and its member states were well-prepared for the cut-off, having secured alternative suppliers and sitting on full gas storage tanks to see them through the winter.

Moreover, the European energy infrastructure of pipelines and the electricity transmission grid has sufficient levels of in-built flexibility and redundancy and has proved resilient to cope with the sudden lack of supply of gas via Ukraine. This even included the capacity of additional provision of electricity to Moldova - a small country wedged between Romania and Ukraine, which had been highly dependent on gas supplies via Ukraine.

POLITICAL AGENDA

The end of overland gas supplies and the EU’s ability to cope with this were thus clearly foreseeable for everyone - except, apparently, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico. He predicted a severely negative impact on the EU, including in terms of the costs and availability of heating and electricity. As his row with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy escalated, Fico also threatened to cut off electricity supplies to Ukraine and warned of further unspecified retaliation measures.

Perhaps most shockingly, Fico even went to Moscow on Dec 22, 2024, for direct talks with President Vladimir Putin. This made him only the third EU leader to go to Russia since the start of the war almost three years ago. The other two that went to meet the Russian president were the outgoing Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer and the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Fico and Orban in particular are well-known for their pro-Russian leanings. They have repeatedly used their leverage inside the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to undercut support for Ukraine. Trying to play the energy card as they did over the end of the Gazprom deal, thus, has less to do with energy security and more with a political agenda in which part of the populist European far right is more than willing to act as a fifth column for Russia inside Western institutions.

For some time now, populist parties have played on voters’ fears of ever-increasing inflation, immigration and an escalation of the war in Ukraine that could ultimately drag NATO and the EU into a direct confrontation with Russia.

Parties on the extreme left and right have done well at the polls last year, including in Austria, France and Romania. They are also likely to be the main beneficiaries of parliamentary elections in Germany in February and potentially of presidential elections in Poland in May.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

The general shift to the political extremes, however, should not be mistaken for a broader tendency towards accommodating Russia. This is certainly part of the agenda of Orban and Fico, as well as of elements in the German and Austrian far right (and to an extent the German far left). But others in the European right, like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and France’s Marine Le Pen, have clearly distanced themselves from Putin’s war. Meloni has gone beyond that and been a strong and outspoken supporter of Ukraine.

Those European leaders closest to the Russian president’s agenda also share a similar anti-democratic and authoritarian streak. Whatever their reasons for doing so, they appear to be working towards weakening Western support for Ukraine and eroding Western leadership in the current international order - much like Putin himself.

They might all be hoping that the return of Donald Trump to the White House will benefit their own aspirations. And in the short term, this may well prove to be the case. Putin may get a good deal from Trump on Ukraine. Orban, Fico and others may get audiences with Trump (and financial support from Elon Musk).

Yet, for Trump and his team, the big prize is defeating China, and both Putin and Orban are likely to fall out of the incoming American president’s good graces if they are unwilling to cut their ties with Beijing - something almost inconceivable for Russia to do.

And Putin’s Eastern European acolytes would also do well to remember that in Putin’s imperial mindset there is no place for truly independent neighbours. This is what prompted the invasion of Ukraine and there is no guarantee that Putin’s vision of Russia as a great power will be confined to the borders of the former Soviet Union.

In fact, there is nothing to suggest that Putin’s re-imagined Russian empire would not be more like the former communist bloc that extended all the way to the Berlin Wall.

In the future, European populists may thus come to regret the erosion of Western institutions like NATO and the EU which they now appear so keen to achieve at Putin’s behest.

Stefan Wolff is Professor of International Security at the University of Birmingham and Head of the Department of Political Science and International Studies.