Oil and Gas - Russia's Eternal Energy Weapons - Have Turned Against Itself. Caught between intensifying European sanctions and relentless Ukrainian attacks on key Russian energy infrastructure sites, the "fossil fuel empire" is trying to stay afloat. What are the roots of Russian energy imperialism, and will Russia be able to return to the European market after Trump's strikes on Iran sent oil prices skyrocketing?
This is what Sergei Radchenko, a historian and Cold War expert, wrote in his study on the "fossil fuel empire" published in the French online publication Le Grand Continent.
On September 26, 2022, seismographs on the Danish island of Bornholm registered two underwater disturbances. The first explosion, which occurred at 2:03 a.m., was detected southeast of the island. The second, at 7:03 p.m., occurred nearby, to the northeast.
It quickly became clear that someone had blown up the "Nord Stream 1" and "Nord Stream 2" underwater gas pipelines that cross the area. Both are majority-owned by Russia.
At the time of this sabotage, Moscow had already been waging an aggressive war against Ukraine for six months. Things were not going as well as President Vladimir Putin had expected. The situation was so disastrous for Russia that the Kremlin was reportedly considering using tactical nuclear weapons. In this context, the blowing up of a Russian gas pipeline, an action likely orchestrated by the Ukrainians, was not unusual: this sabotage was part of a broader military campaign. As a Russian proverb goes: "When you chop wood, the splinters fly."
Yet, before the invasion in February 2022, the idea of war in Europe seemed unthinkable to most Europeans, as well as Russians. Everyone believed that such a conflict would be pointless. At the beginning of 2022, economic relations between Russia and Europe were particularly close: trade between them amounted to 257.5 billion euros.
At that time, the EU was Moscow's largest trading partner, with goods worth 98.8 billion euros (or 62.1%). European imports from Russia consisted mainly of energy products - oil, derivatives and natural gas. While those billions helped fuel the Russian economy, it seemed unthinkable that anyone in the Kremlin would even consider jeopardizing those relationships.
Putin, however, viewed these economic ties differently: to him, oil and gas were weapons he could use to force Europe to accept his imperial ambitions in Ukraine.
The Energy Weapon
While choosing war over trade may seem surprising, it is not surprising that Putin used energy as a weapon to make that choice.
Even before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, Moscow had sought to disrupt Europe’s energy supplies by taking steps to empty Russian-controlled gas storage tanks in Germany or to carry out “repairs” on submarine pipelines.
After February 24, 2022, natural gas prices in Europe rose sharply, jumping from 15-20 euros per megawatt-hour in February-March 2021 to 340 euros at the end of August 2022. In March 2022, the price of a barrel of Russian crude oil (Urals) even surpassed the symbolic threshold of $100.
Although it fell rapidly, its average price rose from $69 in 2021 to $76 in 2022. For Russia, which Senator John McCain called "a gas station disguised as a country", this increase was an unexpected boon. In 2022, the country earned $383.7 billion from oil and gas exports, nearly 43% more than in 2021, before the war began.
Of this amount, $168.5 billion went directly to the state budget, which allowed Putin to counteract the consequences of Western sanctions while significantly increasing military spending.
Although 2022 was a prosperous year for the country's finances, the situation has deteriorated significantly since then, mainly due to falling oil prices and the return to normality in the gas market as a result of the diversification of European supplies and the EU's growing dependence on liquefied natural gas.
In late 2022, Western governments also developed a strategy to deprive Russia of part of its oil revenues without raising world prices. Their initiative included the waiver of marine insurance for tankers carrying Russian oil at prices above a certain threshold, initially set at $60 per barrel.
This strategy was partially successful. The Kremlin was indeed forced to sell its oil at low prices to countries like China and India, which became the main beneficiaries of the restructuring of the oil market. But gradually, by buying up older tankers and registering them under the flags of third countries, the Russians managed to maintain oil supplies and keep their country afloat.
Between 2022 and 2025, Putin's Russia earned over $1 trillion from selling its energy on the world market. The Europeans continued to import gas from their belligerent neighbor, despite all the sanctions imposed. Although oil purchases fell from about a quarter of total European imports to a small percentage (less than 10%), gas continued to flow through the remaining pipelines, even after the sabotage of "Nord Stream".
These flows brought Russia tens of billions of dollars a year. More worryingly, Russian gas continued to flow through war-torn Ukraine to reach European consumers until January 1, 2025, when Kiev ended this unusual practice. If Putin proved anything with his invasion of Ukraine, it was that a gas station disguised as a state can be a formidable adversary.
The war also revealed an inconvenient truth: oil and gas are not just commodities. Both facilitated Putin’s aggression and supported Russian imperialism.
But why did it take a war to figure this out?
The historical roots of Russian energy imperialism
The use of oil and gas as tools of political influence and manipulation is a practice that existed long before Putin: energy policy was indeed an important aspect of the Cold War. It was a key element of the Soviet strategy to preserve its empire in Eastern Europe while simultaneously gaining influence further afield.
A prime example is the "Druzhba" pipeline. Khrushchev's decision in 1958 to build the "Druzhba" pipeline to transport oil from Tatarstan to Eastern Europe was motivated by the realization that unless Moscow helped maintain a certain standard of living in Eastern Europe, there would be a repeat of the uprisings that were crushed by Soviet tanks in Budapest in November 1956.
According to Hungarian Deputy Prime Minister Antal Apro, "Druzhba" will allow the Hungarian masses "to understand more deeply the meaning of proletarian internationalism".
As early as the 1950s, Western analysts realized that Moscow viewed oil not only as a commodity, but also as a politically useful object. This phenomenon became known as the Kremlin's "oil offensive". For the countries of the then Third World, Soviet oil was attractive because it was cheaper. Moreover, Moscow did not require payment in foreign currency for oil purchases: thus Argentina could pay with frozen meat, and Brazil with coffee beans. The idea appealed even to more developed countries, such as Iceland, a founding member of NATO, which by the mid-1950s had become almost entirely dependent on Soviet oil, paid for in cod and herring.
In Western Europe, Italy was one of the first targets of this Soviet oil offensive; between 1959 and 1961, its large national oil company, ENI, concluded agreements with Moscow to import significant quantities of oil in exchange for chemicals and steel pipes.
Although these years were marked by particularly high tensions during the Cold War, with crises in the Middle East, East Asia, Berlin and Cuba threatening to plunge the world into chaos, the United States was deeply unhappy with this decision by Enrico Mattei, the eccentric and ambitious president of ENI. He claimed that he simply wanted to maneuver between the "powerful and arrogant" multinational oil companies and the "powerful and equally arrogant" Soviet Union.
From the late 1960s, the Soviet Union also began to sell significant quantities of gas to Europeans. West Germany was the largest buyer: in return, the country supplied the steel pipes needed to build the main gas pipelines transporting gas from the depths of Western Siberia. For the then German Chancellor Willy Brandt, these trade links provided a natural basis for rapprochement with the East.
The "change through trade" they were supposed to bring about was a key aspect of his "Eastern Policy" (Ostpolitik). During his term, Moscow and Bonn signed the first of the major gas contracts.
For Russia, however, selling gas was never a purely economic matter. On the contrary, Moscow used it for a specific political purpose: economic ties were to serve as the basis for European détente, which, according to the Kremlin, would bring West Germany and other Western European countries closer to the Soviet Union, while weakening the transatlantic alliance.
As Leonid Brezhnev said on February 5, 1971, at a preparatory meeting for the Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: "Energy trade will change our opportunities, our relations with all of Europe... The key is in our hands." The Fuel of Empire
Since the late 1960s, when the Soviet economic model began to show signs of weakness, energy had kept it alive. It powered the big factories that produced Soviet industrial goods that no one wanted; it warmed Soviet citizens in the dead of winter; and most importantly, it provided the Kremlin with the hard currency it desperately needed to import Western technology and, increasingly, grain.
Without the energy surplus discovered during the Soviet Union’s development of the vast oil fields of Tatarstan in the late 1940s, and then of the oil and gas riches of Western Siberia in the mid-1960s, the USSR would have collapsed much sooner.
For many years, historians and the general public considered 1989 to be the most significant turning point of our time. That year saw the fall of the Berlin Wall, followed by the collapse of the Soviet-dominated regimes.
The Cold War then offered the promise of a new world—a world of global capitalism, peace, and prosperity. It was expected that Russia, having lost the conflict, would also find its place in that world. It was no longer a superpower, but it still possessed a nuclear arsenal sufficient to destroy civilization as we knew it. That was thought to be of little consequence in the increasingly borderless world of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Moreover, the country was severely weakened, mired in crime and corruption, and suffering from a deep economic crisis.
Looking back at the 1990s, it was by no means certain that Russia would once again become an imperialist threat. It could just as easily succumb to a post-industrial apocalypse. The fact that it did not collapse, that it not only recovered but also regained its imperial ambitions, is also the story of oil and gas. Just as nuclear weapons survived the Cold War and continue to shape Russia’s identity and its relations with the world, energy has provided a degree of continuity between the Soviet and post-Soviet experiences.
After the end of the Cold War, Russia remained one of the world’s leading producers of oil and gas. It remained connected to the West through aging pipelines. After energy prices recovered in the late 1990s, the Kremlin was once again able to rely on oil and gas exports to fill state coffers and—not surprisingly—create dependencies and buy influence.
Looking back, 1989 was not the turning point we had imagined. It is important to connect the Cold War era and its aftermath into a unified narrative that challenges our understanding of recent history. The two periods certainly have significant differences, but they also share a striking continuity: the connection between energy and the Kremlin’s imperial expansionist project was not as obvious then as it became later. Nowhere was this connection more evident than in Ukraine.
In the 1990s and 2000s, the Kremlin used natural gas to buy political influence in Kiev. This strategy has been widely used by Putin, but the idea of using energy as a weapon to intimidate Ukraine and force political concessions predates him.
Before the current Russian president, his predecessor Boris Yeltsin used gas as leverage to force the Ukrainians to give up their Black Sea Fleet and hand over their Soviet-era nuclear weapons to Russia.
Putin has been more brutal, though not necessarily more successful: he has repeatedly ordered gas supplies to Ukraine to punish the country’s citizens for their pro-Western beliefs. He has also used gas to bribe pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine. In this way, his approach combines geopolitics and corruption in a way unprecedented for the Kremlin.
A similar situation is observed in Germany. The "Nord Stream 1" and "Nord Stream 2" gas pipelines were built despite strong objections from the Baltic states, Poland and, most importantly, Ukraine, who believed they would give the Kremlin complete control over energy supplies.
In Berlin, these concerns were largely ignored, as the city remained committed to the principle of "change through trade". In fact, the Germans had imported gas from their Soviet enemy at the height of the Cold War: so why should they fear Putin's Russia?
Germany was becoming increasingly dependent on a single energy source - Russian gas - but wasn't Moscow, in turn, becoming increasingly dependent on the German market? While these arguments now seem extremely unconvincing, the thesis of Russia's interdependence and reliability still contained some truth: this approach worked during the Cold War. It was hard to imagine that Putin would sacrifice the significant profits from the energy trade on the altar of his geopolitical ambitions.
Yet that is exactly what he did.
The weapon that turned against itself
The very fact that a war is now raging between Russia and Ukraine - a very real war, not a gas war - shows, however, that energy, however powerful it may be, will never be enough to keep Kiev in Russia's sphere of influence.
Putin has tried to play this card many times, but without success: the war is yet another proof that Russia's energy weapon is not as effective as the Kremlin believed. This failure affects not only Ukraine but the rest of Europe as well.
Indeed, unexpectedly for Putin, the Russian invasion led to a dramatic reorientation of the European Union, which has abandoned Russian fossil fuels. This change did not happen overnight, but the trend was undeniable: in 2021, Russia exported around 153 billion cubic meters of natural gas to the EU; in 2022, this figure almost halved to 83.8 billion cubic meters, before falling to 33.4 billion cubic meters in 2023.
While Europeans continued to buy some Russian gas, in December 2025 the European Parliament decided to gradually phase out these imports. Other suppliers - notably Norway, Qatar and the United States - have filled the gap left by Russia.
Thus, Moscow's decades-long painstaking efforts to increase its share of the European gas market - efforts that, as we have seen, were based on both economic and political principles - have suddenly and probably irreversibly failed.
If the phasing out of Russian gas imports is fully implemented by 2027, it will be an unprecedented event: Europe will return to the situation that existed before September 1968, when the first connection between the eastern and western gas systems across the Iron Curtain was opened.
As for exports of Russian crude oil and petroleum products to Europe, they have fallen from 173.2 million tonnes in 2021 to just 21.4 million tonnes in 2023. Such low trade volumes have not been observed since the 1960s.
Of course, the oil and gas trade between Russia and Europe still exists. In Hungary, a country that has refused to cut its energy ties with Russia, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who recently lost parliamentary elections, has been sharply critical of European sanctions imposed on Moscow. Hungarian imports of Russian energy have not been affected by the war; on the contrary, they have increased since its beginning.
Before the conflict, Hungary relied on Russian crude oil for only 61% of its needs; by 2024, that figure had risen to 86%. This crude is then refined in Hungary, and while much of it is consumed domestically, some is also sold abroad.
Before the invasion of Ukraine, millions of tons of Russian crude oil were transported annually to Hungary via the "Druzhba" pipeline. This transport became increasingly disrupted in 2025; in January 2026, the pipeline was damaged by a drone strike, leading to a shutdown that lasted until April.
This incident seriously damaged relations between Ukraine and Hungary: Budapest accused Kiev of sabotaging its energy security. More generally, the fact that Orbán pressured Zelensky to reopen the pipeline while Russia was invading Ukraine illustrates the complex interdependence between geopolitics and energy, as well as the degree of lasting influence that pipelines allow Russia to exert.
This allows Putin to pit European states against each other and undermine collective resolve in the face of Russian aggression. But Putin has failed in his broader project to replicate Hungary’s success elsewhere in Europe, and the election of Magyar, who has promised to end Russian energy imports by 2035, could be a game-changer, even for Budapest. Russia has largely lost the European energy market that could have brought it billions of dollars.
The return of Russia?
In December 2024, I was in Doha for the annual Qatar Economic Forum. This motley crowd of politicians, oligarchs, diplomats, and spies was not the kind of crowd a slightly wacky historian is used to, but I had a specific goal.
I hadn't been back to Russia for several years, as the country was no longer safe for me. I knew there would be Russians in Doha, including some high-ranking ones, so this was an opportunity to learn more from a reliable source. That's how I ended up in a room with Igor Sechin.
Born in 1960, he is twenty years older than me. In the 1980s, when I was a primary school student on Sakhalin - which would soon become one of Russia's main oil and gas production centres - Sechin was in Mozambique, then a Soviet satellite state, working as a translator from Portuguese. He later started working for Putin in St Petersburg and then followed his boss to Moscow. In 2012, Sechin became CEO of Rosneft, Russia’s state-owned oil giant.
“Sechin’s acquaintances,” writes Alexandra Prokopenko, a leading expert on Russian elite politics, “describe him as ruthless and vindictive. His concept of the state’s interests is to consolidate Putin’s power.”
So I listened carefully to what he had to say. Quite unexpectedly, he raised the issue of the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas, who were exterminated by the West. He also touched on the issue of slavery in the United States and the dangers of BlackRock’s purchase of farmland in Ukraine.
His entire speech had a distinctly surreal feel. I wondered if he had gone mad. Has everyone gone mad, inhaling this potent mixture of oil fumes and imperialist arrogance? It’s hard to say.
"Rosneft" and its gas rival "Gazprom" were once formidable companies, the alpha and omega of the Russian business world. In 2004, "Rosneft" illegally acquired the remains of the once-all-powerful Russian oil company "Yukos", founded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a critic of Putin.
The company then experienced explosive growth until October 2021, when its market capitalization briefly reached $100 billion.
"Gazprom" was an even more formidable force. In 2008, shortly before the Russian invasion of Georgia, its market capitalization stood at $367 billion. That was more than fifteen years ago. In March 2026, Rosneft's market capitalization was about $63 billion, while Gazprom's was less than $40 billion—a fraction of its peak.
In 2023, Gazprom posted its first annual loss since 1999—about $7 billion. These setbacks, of course, were the result of Western sanctions against Russia. The once all-powerful oil and gas giants that bought assets around the world, sponsored football clubs, and built billions of dollars worth of pipelines are now struggling to stay afloat.
Between 2024 and 2026, Ukraine repeatedly uses long-range drones to attack Russian refineries, causing major fires and significant loss of refinery capacity.
However, "oil refineries are a bit like a man who has been beaten repeatedly," writes Sergey Vakulenko, a leading analyst of the Russian oil and gas industry. "He won't die from one blow, or even half a dozen. But it will become increasingly difficult for him to recover after each additional blow. Even if no blow is fatal, he can be beaten to death."
Putin probably did not expect such a reaction when he decided to invade Ukraine. The Russian president, a great energy expert who amazed his colleagues by juggling facts and figures about pipelines, volumes and pricing formulas, and who believed - like Soviet leaders before him - that he could use energy as political leverage against both friends and enemies, has ultimately discovered that the levers he possesses are insufficient to subjugate the world.
But he still believes in their effectiveness. Trump’s invasion of Iran, which caused energy prices to suddenly jump to levels not seen since 2022, has fueled Putin’s hope that Europe can rethink its relationship with Russia and that he can return to a European market once again flooded with oil and gas. To make money, of course. But also, as always, to make new friends.