BRUSSELS, January 17. /TASS/. The European Union has started buying liquefied natural gas from Russia at an unprecedented rate this year, Politico reported citing analyzed figures collected by commodities intelligence firm Kpler.
In the first 15 days of 2025, the European Union’s 27 countries imported 837,300 metric tons of LNG from Russia, which marks a record high, up from the 760,100 tons brought in during the same period last year, the newspaper said. Meanwhile a senior LNG analyst at Kpler Charles Costerousse said that "the majority of those volumes are long-term contracts." "So it's not like the EU is buying additional spot cargoes, it's these contracted volumes coming in," he explained.
On January 7, Gas Infrastructure Europe (GIE) data showed that gas reserves in underground gas storage (UGS) facilities in European countries had fallen below 70%, while withdrawal rates since the beginning of the heating season had risen by around 30% above the average of the previous five years.
In 2021, Russian gas supplies accounted for around 45% of the EU’s total gas imports. Most member states made a concerted decision to abandon deliveries of Russian pipeline gas after Moscow obliged all unfriendly countries to pay for gas in rubles in response to the EU’s sanctions. That said, over the past two years purchases of Russian LNG by EU countries surged sharply as they increased by 40% compared with 2021. In May 2022, the European Union started the REPower EU program aimed at bringing the reliance on Russian gas to zero by 2027.