NEW YORK, September 27. /TASS/. The EU's goal to end dependence on Russian energy resources by 2027 is a hard to achieve, since Russia still remains one of the continent’s most important energy suppliers, the Bloomberg agency wrote.
Despite Western sanctions, imports of Russian fossil fuels to the European Union stood at around $1 billion per month at the end of 2023, down from a high of $16 billion per month in early 2022, the agency wrote referring to the Bruegel think tank in Brussels.
Natural gas made up the bulk of the imports, Bloomberg notes. According to the European Commission, Russia still accounted for 15% of the EU's total gas imports in 2023. Much of this gas comes via pipelines through Ukraine and Turkey.
As the agency explains, Russia's European customers "were often locked into iron-clad, long-term contracts that weren’t easy to wriggle out of.".