National Interest

by Andreas Umland

    Prematurely restarting Europe’s energy trade with Russia will only reward Russia’s aggression without securing meaningful changes in its behavior.

    Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the resumption of the energy trade between Russia and Europe has been a common feature of most peace proposals. On October 17, The New York Times reported that President Donald Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, have urged Kyiv and European capitals to consider resuming Russian gas flows through Ukraine’s extensive pipeline network as part of a peace settlement. The logic is straightforward: since both Moscow and Kyiv would profit commercially, such cooperation could pave the way for a ceasefire. The report of the suggestion followed the Trump administration’s announcement of a deal to buy 2.25 million barrels of Russian diesel on October 9.

    American and Russian representatives have also discussed restarting the surviving Nord Stream 2 pipeline under the Baltic Sea—something the White House denies was the subject of recent negotiations. The gas idea follows another inducement floated at talks in Miami earlier this month: a US proposal to unfreeze part of Russia’s immobilized central bank assets and place them under Washington’s control, which European officials rejected.

    Is this a sensible bargain or a poisoned chalice  The answer depends far less on Kyiv than on Moscow.

    If such an economic arrangement could deliver a ceasefire, Kyiv would likely agree to resume Russian gas transit across its territory—and might also not object to gas flowing again through the Baltic Sea. Since early 2025, President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly endorsed both a comprehensive ceasefire and partial moratoria on strikes against energy infrastructure and on hostilities in the Black Sea. On March 11, 2025, in Jeddah, Ukraine accepted a US proposal for an immediate 30-day truce. Russia did not. In June 2026, Zelensky said that freezing the current front line in eastern and southern Ukraine was “the quickest way” to stop the war.

    Over the past two years, Ukraine’s interest in ending the fighting has grown so strong that Kyiv has dropped its preconditions for a full or partial truce. It would accept the current front line as the ceasefire line and would probably tolerate a new form of economic cooperation with Russia on gas transport. Transit fees would be welcome, but they are of secondary importance. Under the 2019–2024 transit contract, Naftogaz booked over $1 billion in ship-or-pay revenues—a meaningful sum, but modest compared with the cost of Ukraine’s postwar reconstruction and the Western budget support it currently relies on.

    Indeed, Kyiv permitted Russian gas transit even in wartime. Not only after Moscow’s first incursion into Ukraine in 2014, but also after the full-scale invasion began on February 24, 2022, Russian gas kept flowing through Ukrainian pipelines to the EU and Moldova until January 1, 2025—roughly 15–16 billion cubic meters in 2024 alone. Financially battered Ukraine needed the income and halting transit would have done little more than divert Russian exports to other routes, such as TurkStream across the Black Sea and Turkey.

    It was not the war as such that ended transit almost three years into the full-scale invasion, but the war’s consequences combined with other factors. These included the expiration of the last five-year transit contract, disputes over Gazprom’s ship-or-pay obligations, Kyiv’s insistence that any gas be non-Russian in substance rather than merely relabeled and the EU’s own phase-out policy, adopted in response to Russia’s escalating belligerence. If Ukraine allowed Russian gas transit during an all-out war, it is likely to do so under a ceasefire.

    In principle, the deal Kushner and Witkoff proposed should be even more lucrative for Moscow than for Kyiv. Fast, large-scale and relatively cheap pipeline exports westward would pour fresh money into Russia’s strained budget. Russia’s oil and gas revenues fell 23.8 percent in 2025 to 8.48 trillion rubles ($103 billion)—a record-low share of federal revenue at under 23 percent and the lowest level since 2020—while the budget deficit reached 5.6 trillion rubles ($68 billion). The slide continued in 2026, with oil and gas revenues down another 17.2 percent year-on-year in the first nine months. The end of Ukrainian transit alone cost Gazprom some 16 percent of its planned 2025 export volume, worth up to $4.5 billion a year.

    Nevertheless, the American idea is likely futile, because it misreads the strategy, ideology and internal logic of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime. Russia’s conduct in Ukraine is driven by historical myths, political resentment, pan-Russian ultranationalism and fantasies of great-power status and territorial expansion. Economic interest is only part of the picture. Putin is therefore likely to reject the proposal as a basis for peace. For him, a gas deal would at most be the icing on the cake of Ukraine’s partial—or, better still, full—capitulation.

    Russia’s recent record illustrates this. Russian gas exports to the EU via Nord Stream did not stop in 2022 because of an attack on the undersea pipelines, as is often claimed. Moscow itself had cut off supplies weeks earlier, at the end of August 2022, sacrificing its largest customer for political leverage. When the idle pipelines were blown up on September 26, 2022—an attack German prosecutors attribute to a Ukrainian team whose alleged leader went on trial in Hamburg on October 14, 2026—one of the four strings survived intact.

    Putin promptly offered to pump gas through it; Berlin refused. The Kremlin offered gas, not a change of course. Moscow has preferred to forgo the bulk of its most lucrative export market rather than moderate its aims in Ukraine. For the Kremlin, revenue from European energy trade is not a priority.

    Meanwhile, a practical obstacle has emerged to reviving both the surviving Nord Stream 2 pipeline and any other route for Russian gas into the EU. On January 26, 2026, the Council of the EU formally adopted a regulation phasing out all Russian gas imports: Russian LNG is to be fully banned from the beginning of 2027 and pipeline gas from autumn 2027. Reviving transit would thus require a fundamental revision of existing EU law.

    The idea of bringing peace to Eastern Europe through renewed energy cooperation is naive and rests on false assumptions. To be sure, Ukraine is no obstacle. Kyiv would most likely accept renewed Russian gas transit across its territory as part of a genuine ceasefire, just as it allowed transit during the first phase of the Ukraine War from 2014 to 2021 and during the first three years of the full-scale invasion.

    Yet to borrow a favorite Kremlin phrase, the “root cause” of Eastern Europe’s insecurity is not economic. It is Russia’s instinctual imperialism, expansionist fervor and virulent Ukrainophobia. Against such impulses, even the most profitable business ventures are useless. Both Czarist and Soviet history teaches that battlefield defeat, not diplomatic victory, cools Moscow’s foreign adventurism and turns Russian attention inward; economic hardship, not commercial success, does the same.

    The most lasting results come when military failure and economic crisis coincide. In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, lost the Cold War and slid into a deep socioeconomic crisis. The Soviet empire broke apart and the emerging Russian state became, for a time, a proto-democracy with relatively restrained foreign ambitions. Something similar would have to happen today to end Russia’s current foreign adventure.

    At best, the flaw in Kushner’s and Witkoff’s approach is one of sequencing. Offered before a truce, renewed gas trade amounts to sanctions relief that rewards aggression; it cannot buy what Moscow does not want to sell. Germany has already tested this strategy with its failed policy of Wandel durch handel (“change through trade”) and above all with its two Nord Stream projects—which helped embolden Russia before the escalations of 2014 and 2022.

    If energy cooperation is to play a role in a settlement, it should come after, not before, a verified and durable ceasefire backed by credible security guarantees for Ukraine. Russian gas flowing through Ukraine to the EU and Moldova could help consolidate peace. It cannot create it.