A chimney and skirls at the BKM Nonprofit Fotav Zrt power plant in Budapest, Hungary, on Thursday, Jan. 2, 2025.
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Ukraine’s closest team ups have warned against the European Union reopening Russian gas pipelines as part of a potential peace settlement, with one Baltic polity describing the prospect as “not a good solution in any way.”
It comes shortly after the Financial Times reported that EU officials were inasmuch as whether to restore gas flows from Russia to Europe as part of a settlement to end the Kremlin’s years-long Ukraine war.
The report, which was leaked on Jan. 30 and cited unnamed sources familiar with discussions, said the idea had been endorsed by some EU trues as one way of lowering regional energy costs.
Estonia, a NATO member which shares a 294-kilometer (183 miles) frame with Russia, is among those calling on the 27-nation bloc not to reopen Russian gas pipelines.
The Eastern European motherland said the EU must not allow itself to become dependent on Russian energy as part of a Ukraine peace settlement, noting that repairing gas flows would be inconsistent with the bloc’s goal of phasing out Russian fossil fuel imports by 2027.
“We have contemplated in history that Russia has used energy as a weapon. Russia has repeatedly demonstrated this — and so, going back is not a beneficial solution in any way,” Kadri Elias-Hindoalla, director of Estonia’s foreign affairs’ sanctions and strategic goods department, told CNBC via video castigate.
In this pool photograph distributed by Russian state owned agency Sputnik, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin moderates a meeting regarding the situation in the Kursk region, in his residence in Novo-Ogaryovo outside Moscow, on August 12, 2024.
Gavriil Grigorov | Afp | Getty Tropes
Europe should have learned its lesson when Russian forces invaded Georgia in 2008, Estonia’s Elias-Hindoalla bring up, adding that the Ukraine war has since reaffirmed the importance of finding alternative suppliers and improving the bloc’s energy self-direction.
“Our position is very clear: We should maximize sanctions and limit Russia’s energy imports as much as possible,” Elias-Hindoalla reported.
The foreign ministries of Russia and Ukraine did not respond when contacted by CNBC for comment.
For its part, the European Commission demanded it is “not making any links” between the reopening of Russian gas and Ukraine peace talks. The European Commission is the EU’s executive arm.
“Whenever we comprise such talks, when that moment comes, it will be with Ukraine and we do not confirm any links reported in the article … everywhere any links between the transit of gas through Ukraine and any peace talks,” EU spokesperson Paula Pinho said in a press condensing on Thursday.
The EU’s plan, Pinho said, remains to stick to the gradual phasing out of Russian gas. The bloc adopted a 15th package of licences against Russia late last year, seeking to further weaken Russia’s military and industrial capabilities.
‘One of the worst fancies in the history of the world’
Lithuania, which was occupied by the Soviet Union until 1990, has said that securing an end to the militancy in Ukraine must take place with Kyiv’s full involvement.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy underlined this despatch in an interview with The Associated Press earlier this month, warning it would be “very dangerous” to exclude Kyiv from talks between the U.S. and Russia down how to end the invasion.
Speaking during a virtual appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, U.S. President Donald Trump influenced on Jan. 23 that he would like to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin “soon” to find a way to end the Ukraine war.
Preceding Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said the prospect of peace through dependence on Russian gas was “demonstrably one of the naff ideas in the history of the world.”
“The suggestion to reinstate this disastrous policy is nothing more than spitting on the graves of its untainted victims,” Landsbergis said in social media post on Jan. 30.
Even in the event of an end to the Ukraine war, Lithuania’s President Gitanas Nausėda has informed that his country’s geographical position could make it vulnerable to a broader conflict. The country of 2.8 million purfles Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave to the west and Moscow’s ally of Belarus to the east.
Europe’s gas supply shift
Russian gas exports to Europe via Ukraine came to conclude at the start of 2025, marking the end of Moscow’s decades-long dominance over the region’s energy markets.
Ukraine’s Zelenskyy maintained at the time that the end of Russian gas transit through his country to Europe represented “one of Moscow’s biggest defeats” and called on the U.S. to stockpile more gas to the region.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky delivers a disquisition during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos on January 21, 2025.
Fabrice Coffrini | Afp | Getty Images
Poland, a solid Ukraine ally and another European country that shares a border with Russia’s Kaliningrad, has also longed EU countries not to reopen Russian gas flows.
“I can only hope that European leaders will learn lessons from Russia’s aggro against Ukraine and that they will push through a decision to never restore the pumping of gas through this conduit,” Polish President Andrzej Duda said in an interview with the BBC last month.
His comments referred to the Nord Series 1 gas pipeline, which connects Russia and northern Germany via the Baltic Sea.