Ukraine forces a halt to flow of natural gas from Russia to Europe

KYIV, Ukraine — The flow of natural gas through a major pipeline from Russia to Europe was cut off early Wednesday after Ukraine refused to renew an agreement that allowed for the transit of Russian gas through its territory, according to officials in both countries.

The move to suspend the flow of gas through a pipeline that had carried Soviet and then Russian gas to Europe for decades is part of a broader campaign by Ukraine and its Western allies to undermine Moscow’s ability to fund its war effort and to limit the Kremlin’s ability to use energy as leverage in Europe.

“This is a historic event,” Ukraine’s energy minister, Herman Galushchenko, said in a statement. “Russia is losing markets, it will suffer financial losses.”

The pipeline through Ukraine, built in the Soviet era to carry Siberian gas to European markets, is Russia’s last major gas corridor to Europe following the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline to Germany, possibly by Ukraine, and the closure of a route through Belarus to Poland.

While the move could substantially reduce Russia’s revenue from gas sales, it also carries risks for Ukraine. Military analysts said that Moscow could decide to bomb Ukraine’s vast network of pipelines, which it has largely spared from attack over the past three years, now that it has little incentive to leave them unharmed.

Slovakia, one of the European countries that most depends on Russian gas, had also threatened retaliation against Ukraine after President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine announced plans in 2024 to shut the pipeline.

Because the expiration of the gas transit deal was anticipated and prepared for by European countries, it was not expected to have an immediate effect on prices, analysts said.

The Russian energy giant, Gazprom, issued a statement early Wednesday confirming that it was no longer sending gas from Siberia through the pipeline.

Even before the move, Europe had sharply reduced its consumption of Russian gas in response to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago. Volumes through the Ukrainian transit pipeline had fallen to around a quarter of their prewar levels.

Besides Slovakia, Hungary, Austria and several Balkan countries had still used Russian gas delivered through Ukraine, but experts say gas in storage facilities and alternative supplies should prevent any immediate disruptions to electricity and heating in these countries.

More vulnerable is Moldova. In December it declared a state of emergency amid fears that an end to supplies of Russian gas through Ukraine would endanger its main source of electricity, a gas-fueled power plant in the breakaway Russian-speaking region of Transnistria.

Gazprom warned Moldova this week that it would halt all gas deliveries on Jan. 1 even if the pipeline through Ukraine kept working, citing a long-running dispute over unpaid bills. Immediately hit by the shutdown was Transnistria, a sliver of Moldovan territory next to Ukraine that, with support from Moscow, declared itself an independent microstate after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

The energy company in the breakaway region told its customers on Wednesday that it would stop supplying gas for heating to private houses in cities, villages and towns. The company will provide gas for cooking “until the pressure in the network drops to a critical level,” it said in a statement on Telegram.

That Russia would risk hurting its own proxies in Transnistria, which has been occupied by Russian troops for more than three decades, is a measure of how the war in Ukraine has altered Moscow’s priorities.

Ukraine, too, has faced difficult choices. Struggling to withstand relentless Russian assaults both on the front and directed at its energy grid, Kyiv appears to have decided that an opportunity to deliver an economic blow to the Kremlin by reducing its earnings from gas exports outweighed the potential risks.

“We won’t allow them to earn additional billions off our blood,” Zelenskyy said when he announced the decision in December to shut down the pipeline.

Stopping the flow of Russian gas through Ukraine is part of a broader battle being waged over global energy supplies as Kyiv and its allies seek ways to cut into the oil and gas profits at the heart of the Russian economy.

It “underscores just how much the European political and energy landscape has changed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022,” Bota Iliyas, a senior analyst at PRISM, a strategic intelligence firm, said before the shutdown.

Russia spent more than half a century expanding its share of the European market, and the main conduit was the Soviet-era Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgorod pipeline from Siberia to Ukraine’s border with Slovakia. It brings the Siberian gas via the town of Sudzha — which is now under control of Ukrainian military forces — in Russia’s Kursk region.

At its peak, Russia supplied nearly 40% of imported gas consumed in Europe.

While most European Union nations stopped importing natural gas that arrived by pipeline from Russia immediately after the full-scale invasion, it was only in June that Brussels put in place sanctions aimed at squeezing Russia’s profits from the sale of liquefied natural gas, which is mostly transported by ship.

As of December, the pipeline through Ukraine accounted for only about 5% of the European Union’s gas imports, analysts said.

An analysis by the EU executive arm, the European Commission, first reported by Bloomberg, found that there were alternative supplies available, and forecasts suggested the impact on prices would be minimal.

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