A few months after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, on the 24th February 2022, the Europeans already mentioned the need to do without Russian energy, of which they were highly dependent and which allowed Moscow to finance his war. It took them more than three years to acquire, finally, a plan to achieve it. The Commission presented it on Tuesday, May 6, and it intends to translate it, in June, into binding legislative proposals, which will then have to be validated by the member states and the European Parliament.
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-To tell the truth, the twenty-seven have already largely reduced their imports of Russian hydrocarbons. In August 2022, they stopped buying Russian coal, which then represented half of their consumption. In December of the same year, they gave up 90 % of their oil imports. Enlivable, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic have been able to continue to be supplied by Russian pipeline Droujba, the time to find a spare solution.
Since then, Prague has made its arrangements, unlike Budapest and Bratislava, whose leaders have displayed their proximity to Vladimir Putin. And Moscow has been able to set up sanctions bypassing, which attenuated the scope of the community embargo. But, ultimately, it has borne fruit: Russian oil today represents 3 % of European imports, against 27 % before the war.
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