Natural gas prices in Europe rose on Thursday to their highest levels since October 2023, in response to the end of gas supplies. Russian natural gas via gas pipelines crossing Ukraine.
With an increase of about 4%, natural gas prices reached 51 euros per megawatt/hour.
Exports from the Russian state company Gazprom were cut off at dawn on January 1, as Russia and Ukraine failed to reach an understanding to maintain flows and the transit agreement between the two countries expired when the year was changed from 2024 to 2025, causing prices to reach their highest value in more than a year.
This is not the only factor that contributed to this increase. Gazprom also announced at the end of the year that it would do so from January 1. Moldova’s state gas company Moldovagaz accused it of breaching the contract due to an alleged debt.
In the case of Ukraine, it was the government that decided to stop the transit of Russian gas, justifying it in defense of national security. “We stopped the transit of Russian gas. This is a historic event. Russia is losing its markets and will suffer financial losses. “Europe has already made a decision to abandon Russian gas,” Ukrainian Energy Minister German Galushenko said on the first day of the year, in a statement carried by Lusa.
Reuters notes that the cessation of supplies via Ukraine marks the end of decades of Russian dominance of European energy markets, but stresses that since it is already an expected outage after nearly three years of war, it will not have an impact on prices. For EU consumers, unlike in 2022, when the supply cut led to a historic rise in prices that had an impact on European inflation.
The last EU buyers of Russian gas via Ukraine, such as Slovakia and Austria, have found alternative sources of supply; Hungary, which will continue to buy gas from Russia, maintains its supplies via the TurkStream gas pipeline, across the Black Sea, the agency itself wrote.
