President Donald Trump is bringing yet another cynical excuse to avoid slapping new sanctions on Russia despite repeated pledges that he would so if Putin kept bombing Ukrainian cities. President Trump is accusing Europe of buying Russian oil and gas and says that he would be happy to slap new sanctions if Europe stopped buying Russian energy.
Europe is actually pursuing a very concentrated effort to fully divest from Russian and oil and gas with some of the serial offenders being actually President Trump’s allies in Europe such as Hungary and Slovakia. Other offenders include Spain and Italy but even they are obliged to fully divest from Russia and gas. Malta has also been facilitating the Russian shadow fleet along with Greece.
The total share of Russian oil imports to Europe went from 22% of the total share in 2022 to just 3% by the end 0f 2024 while the total share of Russian gas imports went down from 45 % in 2022 to 19% at the end of 2024. Russian gas imports are to fall to 13% by the end of 2025 with the oil import share estimated to keep going down even further.
Europe is fully committed to fully phase out Russian and gas and the EU is also progressively increasing sanctions against Russia, while the US is going in reverse by increasing trade with Russia.
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