‘Gas blackmail’: how Putin’s weaponised energy supplies are hurting Europe
One question is dominating the energy industry: will Vladimir Putin turn the tap back on? This week the Kremlin-controlled energy firm Gazprom shut off gas supplies through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline for maintenance until 21 July, having already cut its output to less than 40% of capacity. Now there are growing concerns that the Russian president may simply refuse to reactivate it.
This week energy executives at the Aurora consultancy’s conference in Oxford were asked to vote on whether the supplies would return. A forest of confident arms shot up for “yes”, a similar amount for “no”. Only Putin knows the answer.
Fears for gas supplies have led European nations to rapidly fill up their storage capacity before the winter. Andriy Yermak, chief of staff to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has accused Russia of conducting “gas blackmail”. By contrast, nations with closer links to Russia, including Belarus and Turkey, have seen little disruption.
Although Moscow had a record of restricting gas flows to Europe as part of past disputes with Ukraine – including in 2005-06, 2009 and 2017 – many in the industry had assumed that because the Kremlin kept supplies flowing throughout the cold war, it would not resort to cutting off its largest market. However, Ben van Beurden, CEO of Shell, said this week that Putin has now shown “he is able and willing to weaponise supplies”.
The strategy has the apparent aims of weakening Kyiv’s allies and, potentially, turning nations on one another. This week Hungary’s pro-Putin prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said it would halt gas exports to its neighbours. The move undermines a regulation that made solidarity among European countries mandatory to prevent the supply cuts seen after the 2017
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