By Bogdan Romaniuk

In the first six months of 2026, European utilities and traders took 136 LNG cargoes from the Yamal plant in the Russian Arctic: close to 9.9m tons, up 16% on the year, worth about €6bn. It amounted to more than 97% of everything the plant produced. France, Belgium and Spain took the largest shares.

This was the fifth year of the war in Ukraine. Under the REPowerEU regulation, approved on 26 January 2026, Brussels prohibited Russian LNG under short-term contracts from 25 April and Russian pipeline gas under short-term contracts from 17 June. The long contracts run on: LNG until 1 January 2027, pipeline gas until 30 September of that year. Every cargo from Yamal arrived legally, under an authorized long-term contract, and volumes rose. The EU's own energy regulator recorded Russian LNG up 11% and Russian pipeline gas up 7% year on year between January and May.

Coal was banned outright in August 2022, less than six months after the invasion. Seaborne crude followed that December.[1] Russian pipeline gas, 40% of EU imports in 2021, is now a fraction of that, though TurkStream still runs and the legal prohibition does not bite until September 2027.[2] LNG has been given five years and is not finished yet.

Washington's uranium ban has the same shape. Signed in May 2024 and written to run until 2040, it arrived with statutory waivers available from the Secretary of Energy until 2028. Rosatom, Russia's state nuclear corporation, kept supplying enriched uranium to American utilities under the terms of the law designed to stop it.

Every item on that list funds the same war, and every item is banned or being banned. What separates them is speed, and the spread runs from under six months at one end to six years at the other. Enriched uranium is the hardest thing on the list to replace: Russia supplies something in the order of 20 to 25% of the enriched uranium used by American reactors, and rebuilding domestic capacity is a decade-scale industrial project.[3] A single cargo of LNG is the easiest: a ship, a berth, and a seller who can be swapped for a Qatari or an American one inside a week. Both are still being bought.

The replacement floor

Norman Angell argued in 1910 that the economies of Europe had grown too entangled for war to pay, and that a victor would ruin himself alongside the vanquished. Four years later the guns opened. The argument was rebuilt after 1945 and became the working premise of the World Trade Organization, the European single market, and four decades of German policy towards Moscow. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 ended the strong version of it. The weaker version survives: interdependence may raise the cost of aggression, and it may lower its likelihood, but what it does not do is guarantee punishment once aggression has happened anyway.

Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye supplied the tool for thinking about this half a century ago. They defined vulnerability not as the mere existence of a dependency but as the cost of adjusting to its loss, over the period of time that adjustment takes.[4] Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman later showed why some dependencies become instruments of coercion: connection produces choke points, nodes that everyone must pass through, held by someone in particular.[5] Gazprom throttled Nord Stream through the summer of 2022 and shut it in September, which is what their framework predicts.[6]

Their framework explains why certain nodes become coercive assets. It says less about how quickly those assets decay once the target begins replacing them, and it does not address the question this article asks: after aggression has occurred and punishment has been decided, what determines the order in which dependencies are actually cut.

Moral judgment can explain why Russian supplies became politically illegitimate. It cannot explain why some were cut within months while others were deferred for years. Two other things do. The first is whether a supply can be turned against the buyer. A pipeline runs from one field to one border and nowhere else, and the seller knows the buyer has no exit; a tanker sails from wherever the cargo was bought, and a seller who squeezes loses the customer and gains nothing. The second is how long substitution takes, and here the unit of analysis matters more than anything else in this argument. A single LNG cargo is replaceable in a week. Ten million tons a year is not: that requires terminal slots, shipping capacity, contracted volumes and a global market with the spare supply to sell them.

That gives the replacement floor: the minimum time in which the function can be reproduced. Below it, a government pays in shortages, demand destruction and emergency workarounds. Above it, almost everything else happens. The observed delay is the floor plus whatever market scarcity, contract law, coalition bargaining and domestic rents add on top. The floor can be measured. The premium has to be explained.

There is a further consequence, and it falls on the seller. A supply is coercive only while the buyer believes it will keep arriving. The moment it is withheld, the buyer learns two things at once: that the supply can be turned against him, and that the supplier is willing to do it. Both lessons are permanent, and both start the clock. A lever therefore holds its value only for as long as it is not used. Pull it once and the buyer begins funding the replacement, the reputation that made the dependency tolerable is gone, and the asset that took decades to build begins to run down from that day. This is why a coercive supplier and a reliable one can be the same state, behaving differently in different markets, and why the most valuable dependencies are the quietest.

The pipe was the coercive asset, and Europe worked at it continuously for two years. LNG was less coercive than the pipeline, though not harmless: its danger lay in market scarcity rather than in Russian control, and replacing an Arctic cargo means buying a Qatari or American one on a market that has been short since 2022. Without the same coercive urgency, governments have been slower to absorb the higher cost of replacement. Enrichment creates the deepest lock-in among the supplies already being sanctioned, and it is the one nobody can escape quickly, which is why it was banned by statute and deferred by waiver until 2028. Coal moved first because both halves of the problem were easy: the case for banning it was clear, and the floor beneath it was low.

The countdown starts when a dependency becomes legible as a risk, not when the lever is pulled. RePowerEU appeared in May 2022, while the gas was still flowing and while Europe was still paying for it. Nobody had been cut off. The war made the exposure politically visible, and that was enough to start the phase-out.[7]

What replacement cost

Russia turned the pipeline from a commercial link into an instrument of pressure. Europe then spent two years reducing the damage that instrument could do. Floating regasification units were leased and moored in Germany, at Wilhelmshaven, Brunsbüttel, Eemshaven, and in Italy at Piombino. Norwegian volumes were bought at the top of the market and American cargoes at a premium. Storage was refilled at ruinous cost, industrial demand was cut, and the energy shock added to the pressures already bearing on German manufacturing. Two years was not a political pause: it was the time required to lease terminals, redirect flows, refill storage, cut demand and absorb the price.

Four decades of accumulated position, spent in a single autumn. Russian pipeline gas has not vanished from Europe, and TurkStream still delivers to Hungary and Slovakia, but as an instrument of coercion against the bloc as a whole it is finished. No European government will build its energy security around that pipe again, and that is a loss no ceasefire reverses.

Enrichment runs on another scale. Before the 2024 ban, Rosatom held something in the order of 44% of global enrichment capacity, and Russia supplied roughly 20 to 25% of the enriched uranium consumed by American reactors. What Washington is replacing is not a fuel assembly but a service: conversion and enrichment, an industrial capability the United States allowed to atrophy. The Department of Energy selected vendors in 2024 and issued major task orders in January 2026. The statutory deadline is 2028. Rebuilding the capacity itself will take considerably longer.[8]

Reactors run longer again. Akkuyu in Turkey is built, owned and operated by the Russian side, which finances it, runs it and will decommission it.[9] Egypt, Bangladesh and Uzbekistan have signed on different terms, mostly Russian state credit, but the effect converges: fuel, servicing, spare parts, operator training, regulatory standards and waste handling arrive as one package with a design life measured in decades.[10] None of these is evidence of observed replacement. They are evidence of the kind of dependency whose replacement floor would be measured in decades if the relationship ever turned coercive.

Source: Compiled by the author based on EU Council phase-out rules, ACER Russian gas import data, Reuters reporting on Yamal LNG shipments, U.S. uranium import legislation and Department of Energy materials, and publicly available information on Rosatom reactor projects.

These are not identical commodities.[11] The table compares forms of dependence by the horizon over which the dependent function could plausibly be reproduced, not by any single physical measure, and the final row records a lock-in that has never been tested.

Set the second column against the third, and the striking thing is where the levers were not pulled. The nuclear lever never was. Not a threat, not a hint, not a delayed shipment. Rosatom's leadership went out of its way to advertise reliability throughout, and the fuel kept arriving under a statute written to end the trade. That restraint can be read as the absence of leverage. It can also be read as the only rational way to hold it, because a threatened supply is a supply the buyer has already begun to replace, and enrichment was the one asset Moscow could not afford to spend. Washington legislated anyway, against a supplier that had never once misbehaved, because the countdown does not wait for provocation. Reticence buys time. It does not buy immunity.

Three landlocked countries

The floor sets what is possible. It does not decide what a government does. Three countries began the war under a similar geographic constraint and made different choices.

Czechia, Hungary and Slovakia are all landlocked. All three were heavily dependent on Russian pipeline gas in 2021, and all three said that geography left them no choice.

Czechia took roughly 87% of its gas from Russia before the war.[12] By the end of 2022 the figure was close to zero. It leased terminal capacity in the Netherlands, then in Germany, drew on Norwegian and Algerian supply through the existing pipeline grid, and cut consumption. It finished the job on oil by 2025. The exit was expensive: because of the price spike, Czechia spent more on Russian hydrocarbons in the thirty-two months after the invasion than in the thirty-two months before it. It completed the exit anyway.[13]

ACER estimates that Hungary and Slovakia still sourced roughly 70 to 80% of their gas from Russia in 2024.[14] Hungary extended its supply agreement with Moscow in 2021, the year before the invasion, which is not the conduct of a country that considers itself trapped. Both voted against the phase-out regulation and are now contesting it in the Court of Justice.[15]

The case advanced in Budapest and Bratislava is geographic. No coast, no terminal, no alternative. It has the considerable advantage of sounding like a fact about the world rather than a fact about the government making it.

Czechia does not make geography irrelevant. It makes geography insufficient as an explanation. The same landlocked position, the same absence of a coastline, the same dependence in 2021, and an exit completed in a year at high cost. Non-Russian import capacity into Central Europe, through interconnectors and terminal slots leased elsewhere in the union, was substantial enough that when Ukrainian transit ended in January 2025 the region experienced no supply crisis. Price and routing constraints are real. Physical impossibility is a stronger claim than the evidence supports.

The difference between Prague and Budapest lies elsewhere. For Czechia the dependency was a risk and nothing besides, so leaving cost money and bought security. For Hungary and Slovakia it is a risk that pays: a discounted price, and a privileged supply channel with political benefits attached. Leaving costs them twice. A constraint that has outlived its own disappearance has stopped being a constraint, and beneficiaries of a dependency rarely defend the benefit. They defend a constraint instead, because the discount cannot be named in public and the coastline can.

None of this establishes causation. Viktor Orbán's alignment with Moscow predates the discount and would survive its removal. The defensible claim is narrower. Rent does not manufacture a political position. What it does is lower the cost of holding one, and supply it with an argument respectable enough to repeat in Brussels without embarrassment.

Why the levers keep losing value

The obvious objection is that choke points can be rebuilt. If they expire, build new ones, and that is what has been happening since 2022. Reserves have been moved out of Western jurisdictions, payment rails constructed in parallel to the dollar, supply chains localised. The response to five years of sanctions has been preparation to absorb the next round more cheaply. On that reading the argument describes an endless race in which every actor keeps manufacturing fresh leverage.

The race is real, and it is asymmetric. A choke point is expensive to build, slow to mature, and worth something only for as long as the buyer trusts the seller enough not to look for alternatives. Gazprom spent forty years accumulating a position in Europe and spent it in a single autumn; Rosatom, which never spent anything, is watching American public money assemble the machinery that will end its arrangement anyway, while its foreign revenues slide from over $18bn to around $16.5bn.[16] Trust, once used as an instrument, cannot be rebuilt at the price it was originally bought for. Buyers now look for precisely this kind of exposure. New nodes are not impossible. They are expensive, and the expense falls on the side that keeps building them.

A second objection is harder. Moscow appears to have planned a campaign of weeks. Nobody in the Kremlin was weighing the future depreciation of Gazprom's leverage against the expected gains, because the Kremlin appears to have expected a short war in which the long-term value of energy leverage would matter less. If the aggressor was not calculating, an argument built on the calculus of levers describes something that never happened.

It made no difference to the outcome. Europe replaced the pipeline regardless of what Moscow believed, at the pace that regasification capacity and Norwegian contracts allowed. Substitution runs on construction schedules and contract law, and those are indifferent to the quality of the reasoning that provoked them. This is the advantage of a floor over a calculation: it requires neither a rational aggressor nor a resolute punisher.

This narrows what an international order can enforce. It can condemn faster than it can replace. A state can be punished no faster than its function can be reproduced, and it is almost never punished that fast, because reproduction has to be paid for, and powerful actors inside the coalition often benefit from the dependency remaining in place.

The dependencies worth examining, then, are the ones nobody is arguing about. Reactor contracts signed in Cairo, Ankara, Dhaka and Tashkent create dependencies that may last for decades, and none has been described as coercion, because no overt coercive demand has yet made the dependence politically legible. The same question should be put wherever a critical function rests on a supplier that cannot be replaced quickly. What would leaving cost, how long would it take, and who inside the country would fight to prevent it?

Bogdan Romaniuk is an undergraduate student at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, studying in a program connected with international economic relations and the world economy. His interests include international political economy, energy security, global markets, strategic infrastructure, and the intersection of technology and state power. His current work focuses on how energy transition and technological change affect state resilience and economic security.

[1] Council of the European Union, “EU sanctions against Russia explained.” Source for EU sanctions on Russian coal and seaborne crude oil after the invasion. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/sanctions-against-russia-explained/

[2] Council of the European Union, “Where does the EU’s gas come from?” Source for Russia’s fall from around 40% of EU gas imports in 2021 and the decline of Russian gas in the EU supply mix. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/where-does-the-eu-s-gas-come-from/

[3] U.S. Department of Energy, “Uranium Enrichment, Explained.” Source for Russia’s role in global uranium enrichment services and U.S. reliance on Russian enriched uranium. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/uranium-enrichment-explained

[4] Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence. Source for the distinction between sensitivity and vulnerability interdependence and vulnerability as the costliness of adjustment over time. https://slantchev.ucsd.edu/courses/ps240/05 Cooperation with States as Unitary Actors/Keohane & Nye - Power and interdependence [Ch 1-3].pdf

[5] Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman, “Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion,” International Security 44, no. 1, 2019. Source for the framework of chokepoints, network position, and weaponized interdependence. https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.tufts.edu/dist/2/7314/files/2019/08/Farrell-and-Newman-2019-Weaponized-Interdependence.pdf

[6] Reuters, “Gazprom piping gas to Europe via Ukraine after Nord Stream stoppage,” September 3, 2022. Source for the Nord Stream stoppage in September 2022. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/gazprom-piping-gas-europe-via-ukraine-after-nord-stream-stoppage-2022-09-03/

[7] European Commission, “REPowerEU: A plan to rapidly reduce dependence on Russian fossil fuels and fast forward the green transition,” May 18, 2022. Source for the REPowerEU plan and the EU objective to reduce dependence on Russian fossil fuels after the invasion. https://enlargement.ec.europa.eu/news/repowereu-plan-rapidly-reduce-dependence-russian-fossil-fuels-and-fast-forward-green-transition-2022-05-18_en

[8] U.S. Department of Energy, “Domestic Low Enriched Uranium Supply Chain.” Source for U.S. efforts to rebuild domestic low-enriched uranium supply and enrichment capacity. https://www.energy.gov/ne/domestic-low-enriched-uranium-supply-chain

[9] Akkuyu Nuclear JSC, “About the Project.” Source for Akkuyu as a Russian-Turkish Build-Own-Operate nuclear project. https://akkuyu.com/en/about/info

[10] World Nuclear Association, “Nuclear Power in Egypt.” Source for Russia’s involvement in Egypt’s El Dabaa nuclear power plant and Russian-backed nuclear project structure. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/egypt

[11] ACER, “Report on Russian gas import contracts and diversification,” July 2026. Source for Russian gas import data used in the table. https://www.acer.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/Publications/ACER-Report-Russian-gas-imports-2026.pdf

[12] Heinrich Böll Stiftung, “How to break Czechia’s dependence on Russian gas,” April 21, 2022. Source for Czechia importing roughly 87% of its gas from Russia before the war. https://eu.boell.org/en/2022/04/21/how-break-czechias-dependence-russian-gas

[13] OSW, “The Czech Republic no longer depends on Russian oil,” April 18, 2025. Source for Czechia ending its dependence on Russian oil through TAL/IKL supply routes and completing the oil exit by 2025. https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/analyses/2025-04-18/czech-republic-no-longer-depends-russian-oil

[14] ACER, “Report on Russian gas import contracts and diversification,” July 2026. Source for Hungary and Slovakia sourcing approximately 70–80% of their gas from Russia in 2024 and remaining exposed through the TurkStream corridor. https://www.acer.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/Publications/ACER-Report-Russian-gas-imports-2026.pdf

[15] Council of the European Union, “Russian gas imports: Council gives final green light to a stepwise ban,” January 26, 2026. Source for final approval of the Russian gas phase-out regulation and Hungary and Slovakia’s opposition to it. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2026/01/26/russian-gas-imports-council-gives-final-greenlight-to-a-stepwise-ban/

[16] Bellona, “Rosatom’s exports slip, China buys up Russian fuel, and the US boosts enrichment,” March 13, 2026. Source for Rosatom’s foreign revenues falling from more than $18 billion to around $16.5 billion. https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2026-03-rosatoms-exports-slip-china-buys-up-russian-fuel-and-the-us-boosts-enrichment-the-new-nuclear-digest-is-out