The EU Council approved a phased ban on Russian gas imports: LNG from 25 April 2026, with all Russian gas banned by year-end1. The decision closes the final chapter in an energy relationship that, before February 2022, saw Russia supply roughly 40% of Europe's natural gas.
Much of the decoupling had already occurred by force or circumstance. The Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines were sabotaged in September 2022. Germany, the Netherlands, and Finland built emergency LNG import terminals. Norway, the United States, and Qatar replaced Russian volumes at pipeline-equivalent scale. When Ukraine declined to renew its gas transit agreement in December 2024, the last major overland pipeline route to central Europe shut. What remained was Russian LNG, still flowing through terminals in Belgium, France, and Spain — a trade European governments tolerated because spot LNG markets offered competitive prices and no single member state wanted to absorb the adjustment cost unilaterally. The January 2026 Council vote to ban it required months of negotiation, with Belgium and Spain the last holdouts.
The ban's fiscal impact on Moscow compounds an already severe revenue collapse. Russian oil and gas revenues fell 65% year-on-year in January 2026, with Urals crude trading at $38 per barrel against Brent at $62.502. Before the invasion, hydrocarbon revenues constituted roughly 40% of Russia's federal budget. Moscow has drawn down its National Wealth Fund to cover wartime deficits — a reserve that is finite and shrinking. The question is whether Asian buyers absorb displaced gas volumes at prices that compensate for the lost European premium. So far, they have not. China and India have both extracted steep discounts on Russian crude, and the Power of Siberia pipeline — Moscow's primary gas route to China — has a capacity of roughly 38 billion cubic metres per year, a fraction of the 150 bcm Russia once exported annually to Europe. Power of Siberia 2, routed through Mongolia, remains unsigned.
The April start date carries practical logic: spring reduces European heating demand, giving importers a full summer to lock in alternative supply contracts before winter 2026–27. For Russia, the calendar is less forgiving. By the time the full ban takes effect in December, Moscow will have lost effectively all European energy income within a single year. The energy leverage that underpinned Russia's geopolitical position in Europe for three decades — the implicit threat that winter gas cuts could fracture European unity — is now a spent instrument.
