What Sanctions! Europe Importing Record Levels of LNG Gas From Russia

German special police force members arrive as the Floating Storage Regasification Unit (FS
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Oliver JJ Lane

At present trends Europe is set to import more Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) from Russia than ever before this year, an NGO claims, with billions of dollars spent buying energy from Russia despite attitudes towards their Ukraine war, and the sanctions regime.

While European nations placed sanctions on the gas piped directly from Russia to Europe after its invasion of Ukraine last year, that regime did not apply to gas that comes by boat which is cooled and compressed into liquid form, known as Liquified Natural Gas (LNG). Those imports have soared despite principled talk about starving Russia of foreign trade, and so far this year Europe has bought over half of all Russian LNG exports.

While China is the largest single national customer for Russian LNG, Belgium and Spain come in second and third, and Europe is by far the largest destination for it overall. Europe’s imports from Russia are up 40 per cent this year compared to the same period in 2021 and is on track to be the biggest year for Russian LNG ever, an NGO called Global Witness claims, citing market analysis by Kpler, the Financial Times reports.

This year, Russian imports of LNG have accounted for 16 per cent of European acquisitions, second only to the United States as a source.

While this growth is from a low baseline — before the war gas was primarily imported through the pipelines that flow from Russia to Europe through the Baltic, Poland, and Ukraine, as that is easier and cheaper, nevertheless the growth in purchases shows a move to get around sanctions and still access Russian energy.

A spokesman for the campaign group, which objected to Russian energy from a humanitarian standpoint and to fossil fuels in general on environmental grounds, said the purchases helped fund the Russian war machine and said it was hypocritical for European nations to criticise Russia’s policy while funding it. He said: “It’s shocking that countries in the EU have worked so hard to wean themselves off piped Russian fossil gas only to replace it with the shipped equivalent.

“It doesn’t matter if it comes from a pipeline or a boat — it still means European companies are sending billions to Putin’s war chest.”

Energy security, once thought so unimportant European nations shut down energy storage facilities that could provide a valuable emergency buffer as redundant, shot back into the news last year after Russia invaded Ukraine. Question marks hung over the cheap and plentiful gas which Germany had elected to build its economy upon in the decades after the end of the Cold War, with German leaders rewarded for opening their economy to Russian gas with lucrative directorships.

LNG isn’t the only way European nations have continued to buy Russian energy since the Ukraine war began, claims Global Witness. In a separate report earlier this month, the group said one-in-20 flights refueling in the United Kingdom were doing so on jet fuel made out of Russian oil.

The group said this situation is possible because while the United Kingdom had banned the import of Russian oil, that product was exported to third parties like refineries in India and Turkey where it was turned into jet fuel, ceased to be a ‘Russian’ product, and was then legally bought. The report characterised this trade as using “laundromat refineries” and said the Russian government’s take of the profit on these sales through taxation was netting them tens of millions of dollars.

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