Will Russian Gas Return to Europe?

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been a landmark moment for Russian gas in Europe. Having built ties for about five decades, Russia’s exports of gas to Europe in 2023 were back to the levels witnessed in the mid-1970s. After being Europe’s main supplier of gas in the past two decades, Russia is suddenly faced with a new reality: it’s been downgraded to a marginal supplier. And yet the question of the future of Russian gas looms on the horizon of European energy and climate policies. Russia’s potential ability to price its gas below its competitors, and the presence of businesses and political actors willing to see a return to the status quo ante, makes it important to analyse the conditions that make the return of Russian gas more or less likely. The present paper puts forward a heuristic for explaining past behavior and future choices, based on sunk costs, incumbency and the ideology underpinning policy and regulatory choices. The key argument the paper makes is that these three tenets, or a combination thereof, explain why individual European countries went for Russian gas as a dominant source of supply. By extension, it provides the basis of judging whether Russian gas may see a return to Europe, should Moscow’s war end and a window of opportunity open up for revisiting external supply options. We empirically test this heuristic by assessing the extent to which the policy pathway of select European countries falls in line with assumptions derived from behavioralist approaches, material interests and ideational factors. We then provide an assessment, based on the heuristic, of the three divergent responses that have emerged so far: maintain Russian gas imports, replace Russian gas with other sources of gas, and replace Russian gas with renewable energy. Finally, we conclude by revisiting the analytical prowess of the three-tenet framework and what follows for the prospects of Russian gas in Europe. In doing so the paper fills an important gap in academic literature by examining key institutional, material and discursive factors that shape European energy and climate policies, and by combining them in an integrated heuristic. This paper is co-authored with Adnan Vatansever of Kings College London.