As Eastern Europe marked the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2025, the region could rest assured of a sustainable future independent of Russian natural gas supplies. Almost all of Central and Eastern Europe is no longer dependent on natural gas imports from Moscow.
In 2021, Eastern European countries imported almost half of their gas from Russia. (For the purposes of this article, the term “Eastern Europe” covers the former socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe.) Only two countries in the region—Albania and Kosovo—were wholly independent of Russian gas. In 2024, five additional countries went without importing any Russian gas—six if Transnistria is excluded from Moldova’s import data. Russia went from supplying an average of 80 percent of each Eastern European country’s gas to 37.6 percent.
It is a remarkable transformation that in 2022 many thought impossible. It has happened in part thanks to the EU being able to source gas from other exporters, but mainly because of the development of European liquefied natural gas (LNG) import capacity in the region and its neighbors, in particular Turkey.
Natural gas prices in 2025 remain higher than before the start of the war in Ukraine. With discussion of a ceasefire now underway, some governments—those of Hungary, Serbia, and Slovakia, for example—are calling for Russian gas supplies to resume. Yet, a fundamental economic shift has now occurred. Eastern Europe’s gas market will never return to where it was four years ago.
Putin’s Pipeline Politics
Since the 1970s, natural gas has been Eastern Europe’s most politically sensitive commodity—and has often been the turning point of the region’s geopolitics. As pipelines proliferated across Eastern Europe, Russian natural gas supplied not only the Warsaw Pact countries but also Yugoslavia as it flirted between the Western and Eastern blocs.
The spread of Russia–Europe pipelines in the region continued after the end of the Cold War with the 1994–1999 build-out of the Yamal–Europe gas pipeline through Belarus and Poland. In his first two terms as Russian president from 2000 to 2008, Vladimir Putin then oversaw the launch of the Blue Stream pipeline under the Black Sea to Turkey as well as the start of the Nord Stream project under the North and Baltic Seas to Germany.
In 2021, the year before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia exported 210 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas via pipelines. Almost all of this was delivered via Eastern Europe or the North or Black Sea. Significantly, since the end of the Cold War, Russia has agreed only to gas projects that route deliveries around Ukraine. In 1998, 141bcm of natural gas transited the country; by 2021, this volume had fallen to 100bcm.
Russia’s diversification away from the Ukrainian export route was at the forefront of Moscow’s geoeconomic strategy to divide and conquer Europe, particularly its East. The Kremlin canceled its initial plans for a South Stream pipeline via the Black Sea to Bulgaria after the EU threw up some light resistance to Putin’s 2014 invasion of parts of eastern Ukraine. But Putin found an alternative in TurkStream, a pipeline to Turkey that was launched in 2020 and added 31.5bcm to the export route Russia had first developed with Blue Stream in 2003.
More controversial was Russia’s effort to build the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which aimed to double the 55bcm capacity of the original link that had opened in 2010. The project was opposed by successive U.S. administrations and even more fiercely by numerous Eastern European governments, particularly Poland’s. The route essentially sought to split Eastern Europe’s gas markets from those of Central Europe. Nord Stream 2’s completion would have enabled Russia to turn off gas deliveries to the Eastern European countries with which it was fighting over prices and contracts without interrupting flows to Germany and Central Europe.
Putin’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine shattered the interdependence between Eastern European gas markets and Russia. At the end of 2024, Russian natural gas flows via the region came to a complete halt (see figure 1). Supplies ended when Kyiv refused to renew the transit agreement that allowed the last trickles of gas to transit Ukrainian territory. Ironically, these supplies had proved more resilient than Russian gas exports via pipelines through Poland and Germany, which had already ended in 2022. Bulgaria, Hungary, and Slovakia—alongside non-EU countries Moldova and Serbia—still take limited Russian gas deliveries, but these depend on the Turkish export routes and the Balkan Stream interconnector route, whose capacity is just 15.8bcm.
The end of Russia’s dominant position in the region has been extremely economically painful. European benchmark prices for natural gas rose on average by 163 percent in 2022. Research by the European Central Bank has estimated that the gas shock alone that year added as much as two percentage points to inflation, making it the single largest component of that year’s inflation shock. Natural gas prices in Eastern Europe declined slightly but remained elevated through 2023, although benchmark prices fell by 33 percent in the first half of 2024. They nonetheless remain high compared with their 2021 levels, particularly for households.
The twin issues of how Russia drove this disruption and how Europe engineered its ultimately successful response are crucial to understanding European energy and economic security and Eastern Europe’s ability to withstand Putin’s ambitions for Ukraine and the wider region going forward.
Eastern Europe’s Initial Dependence
In 2021, Russia dominated the EU’s natural gas imports, supplying 45 percent of the total. At 150bcm, Russia’s exports to the EU were nearly double those of the bloc’s second-largest supplier, Norway, which provided just 79.5bcm. In Eastern Europe, only Ukraine and Romania produce significant amounts of natural gas, and most countries in the region are wholly dependent on imports for the gas they consume.
Russia’s role in supplying natural gas was particularly pronounced in both EU and non-EU countries in Eastern Europe. At the top end in 2021 were Bosnia and Herzegovina, Moldova, and North Macedonia, non-EU countries that were all 100 percent dependent on Russian natural gas. Some EU members were nearly as dependent: Slovakia relied on Russia for almost 100 percent of its natural gas supplies and the Czech Republic only marginally less. Austria, Latvia, and Slovenia each imported roughly 80 percent of their natural gas from Russia. The location of the Baumgarten gas storage facility on the Austrian side of the Austria-Slovakia border meant that Austria’s gas market also played a key role in redistributing Russian natural gas that was not contracted for long-term offtakes.
Other countries in Eastern Europe were less reliant on Russian imports. Poland had begun diversifying its energy market by buying large amounts of natural gas that were routed through its Świnoujście LNG terminal. But even Warsaw imported 78.3 percent of its natural gas from Russia in 2021.
Lithuania had moved earlier, launching its own regasification terminal in 2014 and minimizing direct Russian gas imports after that. Estonia devised a strategy of decreasing gas demand by developing alternative energy production and launched the Balticconnector pipeline with Finland in December 2019. As Finland itself imported the bulk of its natural gas from Russia, however, the Baltics as a whole still acquired an estimated 74 percent of their total natural gas from Russia in 2021.
Only two Eastern European countries were wholly independent of Russian gas in 2021: Albania and Kosovo. The former has sufficient domestic resources and relatively meager domestic demand, while Russia’s nonrecognition of the latter meant there was never any trade in the first place. Of Eastern Europe’s larger economies, Romania was the least dependent on natural gas from Russia, which accounted for just 24 percent of the country’s consumption, thanks to its domestic resources.
Croatia is a unique example, and its 55 percent share of natural gas imports from Russia in 2021 was already significantly down on previous years. This shift in Croatian energy imports had been enabled by the construction of the Krk LNG terminal, which is 75 percent owned by the state-run electricity-supply company Hrvatska elektroprivreda.
In neighboring Hungary, the willingness of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to take a soft approach toward Russia has been a constant feature of Eastern Europe’s energy politics both before and since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Remarkably, while Hungary’s dependence on Russian oil was among the lowest of all Eastern European countries in 2021, Hungary received 95 percent of its imported natural gas from Russia in that year. Orbán also awarded a contract to expand Hungary’s Paks Nuclear Power Plant to Russia’s Rosatom in 2014 without a tender. The Hungarian parliament controversially signed off on the deal just as Russian troops were taking control of Crimea that February. Orbán continued this approach even after the full-scale invasion, increasing Hungary’s purchases of gas from Russia’s state-owned gas giant, Gazprom, in the months that followed.
Hungary’s imports of Russian gas charted an idiosyncratic path. In October 2021, Gazprom redirected Hungary’s supplies from Ukrainian routes to the Turkish and BalkanStream pipelines, with plans to also use Nord Stream 2 once it was operational. While this controversial pipeline’s construction was completed in September 2021, Germany suspended it as Russian forces prepared their assault on Ukraine, and explosions damaged both Nord Stream 1 and 2 in September 2022. Earlier, Putin had already manipulated Nord Stream 1 flows to pressure Europe through price spikes. Despite the invasion, Gazprom resumed some deliveries across Ukraine to Hungary after the Sokhranovka transit point was closed in May 2022; following Ukraine’s cessation of gas transshipments at the end of 2024, Hungary transitioned to importing Russian gas from the Turkish and Western Balkan routes.
The routes via the Black Sea and the Western Balkans are also critical for the other Eastern European country that moved to defend Russian gas purchases after the full-scale invasion: Serbia. In 2021, Serbia imported 89 percent of its natural gas from Russia and is just as dependent today on Russian gas imports via the TurkStream and BalkanStream routes. After the invasion of Ukraine, Belgrade doubled down on Russian gas imports, with Gazprom reportedly offering highly favorable three-year contract terms that Serbia is presently seeking to extend.
That is in marked contrast to the situation in Bulgaria, which sourced 94 percent of its natural gas from Russia in 2021 but has since moved to serve almost entirely as a transshipment country for Russian deliveries. Meanwhile, Sofia struck new supply agreements with Azerbaijan after 2022.
Slovakia had initially sought to phase out Russian gas deliveries, too. But this changed after Robert Fico returned as prime minister in the country’s September 2023 election and moved to reverse the previous leadership’s strong pro-Ukraine position. Fico’s government was arguably the loudest in protest against the end of Ukrainian transshipments at the end of 2024. While this protest was unsuccessful, Slovakia’s relatively low total demand has meant that there is just enough capacity in the network to supply the country via the Turkish and BalkanStream routes.
Sanctions and Switchoffs
The end of Eastern Europe’s pre-2022 dependence on Russian natural gas imports came about in large part because of the expansion of supplies from Azerbaijan, additional deliveries by Norway and Italy to Central Europe, and, in particular, the development of LNG import capacity in the region and its neighbors.
What motivated most Eastern European countries to diversify away from Russian natural gas? Solidarity with Ukraine and fears over their own national security were undoubtedly crucial. The Baltics—arguably the region’s most vocal countries in standing up to Russian aggression—banned Russian natural gas imports in April 2022. However, Russia’s willingness to weaponize its gas supplies proved to be an even more important factor.
Gazprom, which held a monopoly on Russian pipeline gas exports to Europe, has still not been sanctioned by the United States, the EU, or the UK. While the EU banned most Russian oil and coal imports in 2022, gas was not targeted in this way. Brussels initiated a plan in May 2022 to end all EU dependence on Russian energy by 2027, but this ambition came in the form of providing financing for alternatives rather than directly targeting natural gas.
It is worth noting that whereas all other major Russian state-owned banks were swiftly sanctioned after the full-scale invasion, the key bank for handling Russia’s gas trade—Gazprombank—was sanctioned only by the UK in 2022. Yet, by the time the United States imposed sanctions on the bank in November 2024, Europe’s diversification away from Russian gas supplies was well underway (see figure 2).
Russia’s own behavior was central. Gazprom had not only suspended deliveries via Nord Stream 1 in 2022 but also unilaterally halted deliveries to Bulgaria and Poland that April. The Kremlin cited as the reason for the switchoff the two countries’ refusal to pay for the gas in rubles, rather than dollars or euros, as the underlying contracts stipulated. A month later, Finland was similarly cut off after it applied for NATO membership.
The EU amended its gas market rules in 2023 to make it easier for member states to ban imports of Russian pipeline gas and LNG, but notably, Russian LNG imports to the continent actually increased between 2022 and 2024. Most of this rise came in 2022 just as Russian pipeline gas deliveries were rapidly being shut down, with total LNG imports then rising from 21bcm in 2022 to 24bcm in 2024. However, this has largely been a non–Eastern European trend. These imports have predominantly gone to France, Spain, and Belgium, with the Netherlands and Greece receiving smaller cargoes.
Germany banned direct imports of Russian LNG but has received indirect deliveries, meaning that some volumes of Russian gas could ultimately be supplied to Eastern European countries, including the Czech Republic and Poland. In another irony of the Kremlin’s mishandling of Nord Stream, Moscow in 2021 reversed flows through the Yamal–Europe route, which had previously run from Poland to Germany, as part of its effort to choke off transshipments via Ukraine.
As Gazprom and Gazprombank remain unsanctioned by the EU, the union still lacks a united policy on Russian natural gas imports, meaning that the primary challenge to restarting Russian pipeline gas exports to Europe is infrastructure, not legality. Three of the four Nord Stream pipes remain ruptured at the bottom of the North Sea, while Ukraine retains control over the routes through its territory—and, at the time of writing, controls the main transit point for its second primary Russian import route in Sudzha, Kursk Oblast, after Kyiv’s surprise August 2024 counteroffensive into the region. The remaining routes via Poland are unlikely to be reopened, as the Polish political elite is united in its opposition to Russian energy imports.
The Costs of Disruption
The transition away from Russian natural gas has come at a significant cost for Eastern European countries. In addition to the indirect inflationary impact, spiking natural gas import costs directly strained the finances of less wealthy countries across Europe. That resulted in large-scale bailout and support packages for consumers and energy firms from richer governments, such as those of the UK, Germany, and Switzerland. Where Eastern European countries intervened in price controls and financial support, they built up substantial debts.
The clearest example of this is Romania. Despite the country’s relative lack of dependence on Russian natural gas imports, the increase in gas prices left it vulnerable. Romania had already begun to cap natural gas prices in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but proposals to phase out these subsidies were abandoned after Russia’s full-scale invasion, and Bucharest has continued to extend them since. The cap also limits payments to power producers, with the Romanian state due to make up the difference. But by the beginning of 2025, arrears on such payments stood at over €1.6 billion ($1.7 billion).
How Eastern Europe Diversified
Eastern Europe’s transition away from dependence on Russian natural gas was enabled by cooperation across the continent, especially with partners such as Finland, Greece, and Turkey. But the fundamental factor was the development of the global LNG market, which has driven the increased globalization of gas prices since 2016. Growth in volumes of so-called flexible LNG cargoes—those that can be traded on the spot market or resold at short notice—played a particularly important role. The highest prices for LNG were often those paid in Europe, but the market structure meant the economic pain was felt globally and shared by those not previously dependent on Russian gas, such as Romania.
However, expansions of LNG import facilities in the region have been limited. The Croatian government has invested in expanding the annual capacity of its Krk terminal from 2.9bcm to 6.1bcm. Poland increased the capacity of its Świnoujście import terminal from 6.2bcm a year in 2022 to 8.3bcm by January 2025. Construction is beginning on another terminal in Gdańsk with a planned annual capacity of 6.1bcm. Lithuania has considered expanding its Klaipėda terminal, but no announcement has yet been made.
LNG imports into Central and Western Europe, as well as Greece and Turkey, have also played a significant role in delivering gas to Eastern Europe. Greece’s Revithoussa terminal has served as a key route for imports to the region. Greece’s importance will only increase, as Athens has doubled its annual LNG import capacity to over 10bcm—70 percent more than Greece’s total domestic annual consumption—following the launch of the Alexandroupolis regasification unit in October 2024.
Turkey is the real driving force behind much of Eastern Europe’s ability to receive LNG, however. Infrastructure via Turkey and from Bulgaria into Hungary, Moldova, Romania, and the Western Balkans is ultimately shared with the TurkStream and Blue Stream pipelines from Russia. Turkey itself is also a significant purchaser of Russian natural gas. Yet, the country’s critical role in getting gas supplies to Eastern Europe is undeniable. Turkey has five LNG import terminals—more than all of Eastern Europe put together—and is estimated to have spare import capacity of 25–30bcm a year. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has pledged to significantly expand Ankara’s own production in the coming years. And Turkey also lies on the route for Azerbaijani gas supplies to Eastern Europe.
Supplies of Azerbaijani gas—piped via Georgia to Turkey before reaching European markets in Albania, Greece, and Italy through the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) and the Trans-Anatolian Pipeline (TAP)—had been at the core of the EU’s Southern Gas Corridor strategy to diversify away from Russia long before its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Once again, conflict played a major role: The EU announced the policy just a month after Russia’s 2008 war with Georgia. TANAP began deliveries in 2018, and TAP started commercial operations in November 2020, with annual capacity of 16.2bcm and 10bcm, respectively. Since 2022, the pipelines have frequently been at full capacity, and in 2023 TAP announced plans for an extra 1.2bcm a year. The launch of the Greece–Bulgaria interconnector pipeline in 2022 also helped bring supplies of Azerbaijani gas as well as LNG to Eastern Europe at a crucial moment.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen traveled to Baku to meet Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in July 2022 and signed a memorandum of understanding in which the two sides pledged to double supplies from Azerbaijan by 2027, from 8.1bcm that year. In January 2025, Baku reported that deliveries to Europe had reached 12.9bcm in 2024, but there are concerns that the 2027 goal is unrealistic because of Azerbaijan’s high domestic demand and declining production at its Shah Deniz field. Just a week after announcing the 2024 increase in gas supplies, Azerbaijan briefly declared force majeure to enable a halt to contracted deliveries to Bulgaria and Serbia.
In addition to Poland’s growing LNG import market, the country has benefited from the September 2022 launch of the Baltic Pipe, which carries 10bcm of natural gas a year from Norway. Since a new gas interconnector was launched in October 2022, Polish pipelines to the Czech Republic and, in particular, Slovakia also enable trade between southern and northern Eastern European gas markets. From Poland, the market is connected to the Baltic states, which have benefited from connections to Finland’s 5bcm-a-year Inkoo LNG import terminal thanks to the Balticconnector pipeline. This pipeline was at the center of a suspected sabotage incident in October 2023, when a Chinese ship admitted to dragging its anchor and damaging it; this episode was followed by two similar incidents that damaged subsea cables in 2024.
Eastern Europe is forecast to marginally increase its own production, as Romania’s Neptun Deep project aims to make the country the EU’s largest natural gas producer and a net exporter for the first time when it launches in 2027. At its peak, the project is expected to produce 8bcm of natural gas a year, nearly doubling Romania’s current production.
What the Future Holds
The expansion of Norwegian and (potentially) Azerbaijani supplies, prospects for growing Turkish and Romanian deliveries, and the growth of the LNG market have firmly established that Eastern Europe can solidify its shift away from Russian natural gas. Gas prices have not returned to their pre-2022 levels, which is one reason why some governments—those of Hungary and Serbia, in particular, but also Slovakia—are calling for Russian gas supplies to resume.
In theory, geopolitical context aside, Moscow should be willing to offer its European clients vastly discounted prices in the hope of restarting what was once its key export market, but there is little expectation that it will do so. The experiences of Russia’s 2022 weaponization of its gas supplies will linger in the minds of many Eastern European governments for a long time to come. In March 2025, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump floated a plan to ease sanctions on Russia as part of an eventual deal for a ceasefire in Ukraine. But it is not in the White House’s power to force Ukraine or Poland to restart transits or to order Germany to support the repair and resumption of the Nord Stream pipelines.
Balancing the development of natural gas networks in the Western and Eastern Balkans against potential Russian supplies through these regions is critical. As the main supplier of LNG, Azerbaijani gas, and the remaining Russian gas to the region, Turkey will play a pivotal role in determining the ultimate balance. Ankara cannot, however, require Bulgaria or another third country to expand its infrastructure if the consequence is the entry of Russian gas. While Eastern Europe is unlikely to become as dependent on Turkish-supplied gas as it was on Russian imports before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, governments should bear in mind the risk of a renewed concentration of supplies, which should drive efforts to develop additional regional LNG facilities.
Going forward, the EU should continue to support the diversification of supplies by investing in the development of new resources in the region and supporting additional LNG offtake infrastructure on the North, Baltic, and Adriatic Sea coasts. There is no guarantee that Eastern Europe and the rest of the continent, or major partners such as Turkey, will remain as unified in the drive to diversify gas supplies as they have been for the past three years. Only by ensuring competition among suppliers, the diversification of delivery routes, and sufficient local resources can the region avoid falling into the concentration risk that Russia presented three years ago.
This is particularly important as Russian gas no longer flows to Austria, which imported between 83 percent and 98 percent of its natural gas from Russia in 2023, depending on the month. Although it is a fairly small consumer of gas, at roughly 6.9bcm a year, Austria’s storage and distribution networks are vital for Central and Eastern Europe.
Additionally, once peace is achieved in Ukraine, the country’s natural gas demand will rise significantly and almost certainly require new, non-Russian supplies. Eastern Europe’s experience these past three years nevertheless proves that cooperation and diversification can succeed even in the most challenging circumstances—a lesson that should be at the forefront of policymakers’ minds.
Maximilian Hess is the founder of the political risk consultancy Enmetena Advisory, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and an associate fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
