Europe is bracing for another energy crisis this winter, teeing up a high-stakes early test of how a newly inaugurated Trump administration will attempt to balance efforts to reset relations with Russia against the needs of US allies seeking fuel to stay warm during what’s forecast to be an unusually cold season.
On Jan. 1, 2025, the Russian state-owned gas giant Gazprom’s long-standing contract to ship fuel to Europe via Ukraine’s pipelines expires. With no renewal deal in sight as Moscow intensifies its assault on its neighbour and the US ratchets up sanctions on Russia’s gas business, Gazprom is now planning for the total end of sales to Europe transiting through Ukraine next year.
The breakup has already begun. This week, Gazprom completely cut off shipments of gas to Austria for the first time in 50 years over a payment dispute. Unless Kyiv brokers an eleventh-hour deal to keep Russian gas flowing through Ukraine, Slovakia is expected to face major shortages in January, drawing supplies away from fellow European Union countries right as winter drives up demand. With Germany already burning through gas supplies to make up for the lost power from the nuclear plants it shuttered two years ago, Europe is increasingly relying on costly imports of liquefied natural gas to make it through winter.
Few places will feel the pinch as much as Moldova, one of Europe’s poorest nations and the one its own leaders have described as the “most vulnerable country” in Europe to “Russian energy blackmail.”
Russia’s invasion in 2022 sent shockwaves through the tiny former Soviet republic landlocked between Romania and Ukraine. Like Ukraine, Moldova’s government is attempting to embrace the West and ultimately join the EU. But as in Ukraine and Georgia, Moscow has maintained some control in Moldova by propping up pro-Russia separatist forces in a breakaway province.
Russia has maintained a military base in the mountainous sliver of a region on Moldova’s eastern border called Transnistria since the 1990s and provided the unrecognised government in the regional capital of Tiraspol with gas so cheap it’s practically free.
Gazprom is also the co-owner of the gas utility that serves all of Moldova and has threatened repeatedly over the last three decades since independence to cut off supplies amid disputes.
Over the last three years, the country almost quit buying Russian gas for heating, instead purchasing fuel on the market and shipping it into Moldova via Romanian pipelines. Moldova approved new transmission lines to Romania, too, clearing the way to buy more surplus nuclear power from its EU neighbour. The government in Chișinău even built some solar panels, boosting the limited supply of renewable power.
During an interview with HuffPost earlier this month on the sidelines of the WebSummit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal, Dumitru Alaiba, the deputy prime minister in charge of economic development, said Moldova was “no longer dependent” on Russia for gas.
“Three years ago, we were the most vulnerable country on the continent in terms of energy blackmail from Russia,” Alaiba claimed. “In three years, we have succeeded to essentially decouple our gas supply from Russia.”
Over the next two weeks, however, members of Alaiba’s own administration ended up rushing to St Petersburg for emergency meetings with Gazprom’s chief executive about how to increase the supply of gas from Russia, warning that looming shortages threatened a “humanitarian catastrophe.”
That’s because Moldova still relies on Transnistria’s biggest power station for roughly 70% of its electricity supplies — and that plant depends on heavily subsidised Russian gas delivered through Ukraine’s pipelines. Chișinău has managed to pay for higher-priced gas shipped through Romania over the last three years, but now Moldova will be competing with Austria and other Central European powers for shipments via the EU’s pipeline network.
Barring an unlikely last-minute deal with Ukraine to keep gas flowing, there are few good options for avoiding a supply crunch.
European proposals earlier this year for a deal to swap Russian gas shipped via Ukraine with gas from Azerbaijan ignored that the Central Asian nation does not have sufficient additional supplies in the short term to replace Russian gas volumes, a recent study from Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy found. Plus, virtually every pipeline route from Azerbaijan cuts through Russia or through war-torn territory Moscow controls in Ukraine’s east, raising doubts as to whether the damaged infrastructure could safely transit fuel even with the Kremlin’s reluctant blessing.
DANIEL MIHAILESCU via Getty Images
Gas speculators could also buy shipments of gas at the Russian border and cut a separate deal to channel that supply through Ukraine. But those types of high-risk, short-term deals require a lot of upfront cash. Brokering those kinds of contracts could cost even more since the US levied new sanctions on Gazprom’s in-house bank this month, forcing anyone looking to buy a shipment of fuel from the Russian gas giant to first obtain special permission from Washington.
It’s unclear how the incoming Trump administration will handle a crisis analysts expect to continue past the Republican president-elect’s January 20 inauguration.
The Biden administration aggressively sanctioned Russia’s gas industry, successfully stymieing the Kremlin’s efforts to open a new facility to export liquefied natural gas — the version of the methane-based fuel super-chilled to a liquid form for more efficient transportation — in the Arctic. Despite a failed Democratic attempt to pause permitting on new US. LNG terminals that Republicans roundly criticised, Biden oversaw higher levels of oil and gas production than at any point during Trump’s previous term, vaulting the U.S. to the top spot as the world’s top LNG exporter.
Trump’s promise to swiftly bring about a peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv, and his public praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin, have been widely interpreted as a sign the Republican will champion the more radical, antiwar faction in his party that wants to end American support for arming Ukraine. By picking Senator Marco Rubio (Republican, Florida) as his nominee for secretary of state, however, Trump selected a potential top diplomat who “has consistently wanted to punish Russia for its aggression in Ukraine but has come to believe that a negotiated settlement between Moscow and Kyiv is the only realistic way to end the war,” according to a recent analysis by Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
One clear contrast in foreign policy may be the Trump administration’s expected skepticism of foreign aid without what Republicans deem a clear US interest.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the Biden administration has nearly doubled its aid to Moldova, giving close to $1 billion in funding for projects like the new transmission lines to Romania’s electrical grid. The money, part of a cumulative $2.6 billion Washington granted Chișinău over the past three decades, served the Biden White House’s dual goals of weaning Moldova off Russian energy and slashing carbon emissions by redirecting the country’s electricity demand from a gas plant to a nuclear-powered system in Romania, a NATO ally.
“If Moldova wants to save itself with a Trump administration coming on, it’s going to have to rethink its entire approach to many things – and soon.”
– Suriya Jayanti, energy expert and fellow at the Atlantic Council
Analysts say that Trump is likely to end that support.
“If Moldova wants to save itself with a Trump administration coming on, it’s going to have to rethink its entire approach to many things – and soon,” said Suriya Jayanti, a lawyer and former US diplomat who has worked on renewable and nuclear energy projects in Ukraine and Moldova.
“With Moldova, I don’t see what the clear US interest is from a Trump White House perspective,” she added. “The Russia-is-pure-evil logic doesn’t seem to hold in his world, and that was the only real logic to supporting Moldova, especially to the extent we have been.”
Moldova is now “preparing for difficult times,” said Tatiana Mitrova, a research fellow at Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy who coauthored the report this summer on the barriers to replacing Russian pipeline gas with fuel from Azerbaijan.
Moldovagaz — the country’s monopoly gas utility, which is a joint venture between Gazprom, the Moldovan government and the Transnistrian administration — asked regulators for permission this week to hike consumer natural gas prices by 40% to raise money for what are expected to be more expensive supply contracts.
But those deals would likely only secure more gas for Moldova’s pipeline network — not for Transnistria or the Moldovan towns on the regional border that depend entirely on electricity produced in the breakaway province with Russian gas. Plans to buy more electricity from its EU border may not prove as solid as before, either, now that a far-right, pro-Russia candidate has won in the first round of Romania’s presidential elections.
“Such a situation of interruption of the gas supplies would not be simply a crisis,” said Oleg Serebrian, the deputy prime minister in charge of Moldova’s relations with Transnistria, according to the country’s state news agency. “I dare to say that it would actually be a humanitarian catastrophe.”
Mitrova echoed that concern.
“There are lots of unknowns, but for Moldova, I’m afraid, it’s going to be a very difficult winter,” she said. “That’s why there are claims it’s catastrophic. I share those fears. It’s really going to be very difficult.”
Alaiba admitted that the last three years showed him “you cannot really make a U-turn” with an entire energy system. But he said the half of Europe that once saw Russia as a reliable gas supplier has now come to understand what Moldovans have experienced for three decades as the Kremlin routinely threatened to cut off gas during political disputes.
“The process of decoupling is neither cheap nor happens overnight,” he said. While breaking free from Transnistria’s grip on Moldova’s electricity supply “is not technically possible at the moment,” he said there’s no turning back from his country’s westward trajectory.
At the start of this century, Moldova sold 70% of its goods to Russia. Now, that same percentage of exports heads westward into Europe and North America. Record plum exports vaulted Moldova to the No. 3 spot worldwide last year — making the country Europe’s undisputed top seller of the succulent stone fruit. Construction of the transmission lines to Romania, Alaiba said, is “already underway.”
“You have to have a necessary degree of resilience and independence in order to ensure the long-term stability of your economy, and being dependent on one country that is prone to using the relationship as your one supplier… has caused us to waste three decades,” Alaiba said. “Let that be the lesson from Moldova.”
