'We really need to act': EU breaks taboo with first-ever sanctions on Russian LNG, 19 September 2025

After more than three and a half years of brutal war in Ukraine, the European Union has broken a long-held taboo: sanctions on Russian gas.

The bloc has long applied sanctions, which require the unanimous approval of all 27 member states, to imports of Russian oil and coal, but has left Russian gas untouched, causing dismay among Kyiv and Eastern European countries.

The thinking changed...when the European Commission proposed, for the first time, applying sanctions on Russian gas, specifically liquefied natural gas (LNG), which today continues to flow into Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain and Portugal.

"So far we have not had sanctions on buying gas from Russia, and this will now change," Dan Jørgensen, the European Commissioner for Energy, told Euronews in an interview...

The Commission previously presented an ambitious roadmap to eliminate all purchases of Russian fossil fuels by the end of 2027 at the latest.

But amid heavy pressure from Donald Trump, who has urged Europeans to cut all energy ties with Moscow, Brussels has taken a step to speed things up. If approved, the package will bring the end of Russian LNG one year earlier to 1 January 2027.

In parallel, Jørgensen explained, legislative work will continue to complete the phase-out, which will gradually remove all purchases of Russian pipeline gas and nuclear fuels.

Last year, the bloc spent an estimated €21.9 billion on Russian energy...

While the roadmap, which is trade policy, requires a qualified majority to be approved, the new ban on Russian LNG, which is a sanction, needs unanimous support.

This means that individual governments will be able to derail the measures...

All eyes will be on Hungary and Slovakia, which have a long track record of vetoes. The two landlocked countries do not buy Russian LNG but still receive Russian oil through the Druzbha pipeline and Russian gas through the TurkStream pipeline...

The Commissioner confirmed that the latest sanctions package would not revisit the legal carve-out that has allowed Hungary and Slovakia to obtain crude from the Druzbha pipeline, which Ukraine attacked in August to cripple the Kremlin's war chest...

The bloc has shifted heavily to US-made LNG, leading critics to warn that the historic dependency on Russian energy is being replaced with an American version.