Russia is no longer able to send natural gas to Europe through Ukraine’s pipelines after a five-year deal, struck before the war began, expired on Wednesday.
It marks the completion of a long-standing arrangement that used Ukraine as a conduit for Russian fuel to the west, an arrangement that continued when a full-scale war broke out in 2022.
The European countries that won this fuel, such as Slovakia and Austria, were paying Russia for this energy. The re -deficient calculated in December that the Russian economy would earn around $ 5 billion in 2024 for fuel pipes through Ukraine.
The news firm also estimated that Kyiv obtains between $ 800 billion and $ 1 billion this year in transport costs.
But Ukraine had indicated for months that he planned to let the agreement expire on January 1, 2025, and that he is now intelligent in that commitment.
“When Putin won the Russian presidency more than 25 years ago, the annual transit of fuel through Ukraine in Europe totaled more than 130 billion cubic meters. Today, this is at 0,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote.
Ukraine’s energy minister, Herman Halushchenko, said the transit deal ceased because of national security reasons.
The Russian gas conglomerate Gazprom confirmed on Wednesday that its energy flows through Ukraine had stopped, citing “repeated and explicit refusal of the Ukrainian side to extend these agreements.”
The Ukrainian-Russian agreement, now disappeared, has exposed the complexities of the war and its political consequences in Europe, the countries of the European Union had difficulties in reducing their dependence on Russian power that weapons to Ukraine and tried to sanction Moscow .
And while thousands of other people died every week in the middle of the hard fights in Louhansk, Donetsk, Kharkiv and Koursk, the fuel that circulated in the same spaces allowed kyiv and Moscow to take merit of the goods and services in the other.
Ukraine has been channeling Russian fuel to Europe since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and energy consumers, first, expressed considerations that they would not locate a source of choice in time if the agreement required.
The Slovak Prime Minister, Robert Fico, criticized kyiv’s resolution in a New Year’s speech, saying that reasonable Russian fuel would create a “drastic impact” on EU nations, but would not damage Russia.
Austria, on the other hand, reduced ties with Gazprom in December, accumulating Russia from blackmail from the Austrian fuel corporate MVNO through the use of energy as a bargaining chip on Europe for Ukraine.
Losing Austria as a visitor is another blow to Moscow’s fuel industry when Europe receives its Russian energy supply.
The EU said in March that about 8% of its Herbal fuel arrived here from Russia in 2023, 40% in 2021.
From the beginning of the war, the United States and Norway have two of the greatest winners among Herbal fuel suppliers. The EU said that fuel purchases in the United States in 2023 had tripled since 2021, filling only around 20% of the fuel imports of the Union.
Some countries of the continent, such as Hungary, an EU member led through a president who maintains close ties with Moscow, have access to the Russian fuel through the Turkstream pipe, which runs along the Black Sea to the Balkans.
Moldova, which is an EU member state, and its separatist-controlled territory Transnistria is expected to be affected by the Ukraine-Russia deal, as the country’s largest power plant has traditionally relied on Russian gas.
Correction: January 2, 2025 – An earlier edition of this story has incorrectly extinguished the title of Robert Fico. It is the Prime Minister of Slovakia, the President.
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