Pt.2: The Fault Lines of Europe’s Energy Future

The Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maria Malmer Stenergard, recently made headlines with a loud critique of EU/Russia trade relations. “This is nothing but a disgrace”, she stated, referring to a diagram in her hands showing how Europe has spent more money buying energy from Russia, than it has on aiding Ukraine. This questions the EU’s role as a mediator and its willingness and capabilities to find solutions for peace. In 2025, this Union, made up of many nations, with even more vastly different cultures, does not make up a tough player in the global battle for power. 

The European Union sometimes does not even seem to know who its enemy is. Hungarian president Viktor Orbán frequently pays visits to Moscow. His most recent visit sparked a passive-aggressive comment from German chancellor Merz, who told reporters: “He is acting without a European mandate and he is doing so without consulting us but that is nothing new.”

Nothing new, and yet this goes on. Finding a different path for Europe seems like an impossible task in this large, global economy. There is a lot of disagreement on this small continent. Stenergard’s diagram may have sparked headlines, but the imbalance it exposes is hardly new. Europe keeps insisting it stands up for its liberal core principles; solidarity, and moral strength. Yet its actions are too often shaped by dependence, hesitation and quiet internal quarrels. These are just a few of the reasons why Russia is allowed to be the offensive player it currently acts as. A significant portion of this relates to its special position in global energy politics.

Russia’s grip on Europe is not only political, it runs straight through the pipelines that heat European homes and fuel its industries. Even after years of sanctions, and plans for future “independence,” Moscow still sits comfortably at the centre of Europe’s energy map. Many of the EU’s long-standing partners remain tied to Russia by old contracts. Countries that might have helped Europe take a step away from Russian fuel, Turkey among them, find themselves locked into relationships with the Kremlin that Europe cannot easily break.

Ankara continues to serve as both a loyal Russian-gas customer and a transit hub. Its pipelines, open to Russia at preferential terms, effectively give Moscow a hand on Europe’s thermostat. Kazakhstan’s oil still flows almost entirely through Russian territory, a fact the Kremlin occasionally reminds the world of by casually restricting access to the CPC pipeline whenever it needs leverage. Even Saudi Arabia, coordinating oil production with Russia through OPEC+, shapes global prices in ways that leave Europe reacting rather than acting.

These tangled relationships mean that anytime the EU tries to find a new supplier or renegotiate an old contract, Moscow can tug a string somewhere else. Raising prices, limiting transit, or simply threatening to do so. Europe may speak often of “energy independence,” but the reality is a dependency web in which Russia still decides which threads remain intact.

And if Russian influence abroad complicates Europe’s choices, Europe’s internal divisions do the rest. Here, each member state carries its own energy history, and its own politics tied to them. What passes as ambition in one country is seen as recklessness in another. As visible throughout the past few decades of debate on renewable energy which have contributed to significant fragmentation. The EU’s grand goals, security, market integration, climate progress, must constantly be watered down to satisfy a room of twenty seven governments, each guarding its own interests.

For all the talk of strategy, Brussels still carries the habits of a continent that once believed markets could solve everything. The Joint Research Centre admits as much in a recently published paper: Europe has almost no tradition of treating energy as a matter of hard security. Through the 2000s, the EU convinced itself that liberalisation, competition and carbon targets were enough to keep the lights on. Even after Russia cut gas through Ukraine in 2006 and 2009, the warnings were politely filed away. The result is the system we live with now, a half-finished energy transition built on fragile assumptions, where geopolitical risk was an afterthought until the bombs fell on Ukraine. Today, Europe is paying for a decade in which it refused to look at energy through anything but an economic lens. The result is an energy strategy that moves, but rarely in a straight line. It advances in compromises, half-measures, last-minute negotiations and carefully worded declarations that all sides can claim as victories. In a world where energy is power, Europe still struggles to speak with one voice, even as the challenges around it grow sharper, louder, and far less patient.