Will Russia cut off gas to Europe?

As you know, with Russia's declaration of war on Ukraine, an atmosphere of war began to emerge in the world, and one of the most frequently asked questions in this process is, will Russia cut gas exports in order to impose sanctions on the European Union? If you are looking for a short answer to this question, the answer is no. Now let's take a look at why.

First of all, we need to talk about the effects of this on Russia. In the image above, you can see what Russia exports to the world. The 4 large rectangles shown in brown on the left are the fossil fuels that Russia exports the most. 55% of Russia's total exports consist of fossil fuels and 60% of these fossil fuel exports go to EU countries.

In this table, it is seen what percentage of these exports go to which countries. As you can see from the table, a very large part of Russian exports go to EU and NATO bloc countries.

Graph from Statistia

In this chart, you can see how dependent European countries are on Russian gas.

Now it's time to put all of these statistics I've shown into a whole. As you can see from these graphs, the European Union needs Russian gas to run its economies and supply electricity to people's homes. Likewise, the Russian state has to sell Russian gas to Europe in order to feed its people and to develop its economy in a sustainable way. Suspending the sale of Russian gas to EU and NATO allies means that Russia lost 40% of all its exports overnight.

Photo By KWON JUNHO

There is a perfect mutualism between the European Union and Russia, and as you can see from these tables, both sides will not like to disrupt this mutualism.

We know that European states have turned to renewable energy sources in order to reduce their dependence on Russian gas in the past years, but it is certain that EU countries will not be able to achieve their independence from Russian gas in the near future.