by Steven Richards
Europe’s tough talk on defending Ukraine contrasts with Russian oil purchases and faltering military forces.
Europeans are boasting about plans for a greater role in aiding Ukraine in its war with Russia and taking on their own security, but they continue to drink down Russian oil as they may be allowing their own militaries to become weak and severely depleted.
In the fallout from the Oval Office fracas between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, European countries led by France and the United Kingdom have proposed unilaterally shouldering a greater defense burden and supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia.
However, despite supposedly hard-hitting sanctions and tough talk towards Russia, Europe’s lack of adherence when it comes to Russia’s energy industry is mismatched with its rhetoric. A recent study found that Europe’s purchases of Russian oil and gas in 2024 eclipsed its total financial aid to Ukraine that same year.
“Purchasing Russian fossil fuels is, quite plainly, akin to sending financial aid to the Kremlin and enabling its invasion. [It’s] a practice that must stop immediately to secure not just Ukraine’s future, but also Europe’s energy security,” Vaibhav Raghunandan, an analyst at Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air, the think-tank that authored the recent report on Europe’s imports of Russian oil and gas, told The Guardian.
Addicted to Russian oil and gas
Despite the Western sanctions imposed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia’s fossil fuel revenues have decreased by only 8% from the year prior to the invasion, CREA concluded. A chunk of those revenues came from Europe, according to CREA.
Additionally, Russia earned EUR 21.9 billion for fossil fuels exports to Europe, a decline of only 1% since the year prior to the invasion. This income outstripped Europe’s financial aid to Ukraine by about three billion euros.
The sanctions have failed to eliminate a significant portion of Russian fossil fuel exports, which are a vital source of revenue for the state as it funds the war in Ukraine. Over the past decade, Russia has relied on oil and gas to supply between 30 and 50 percent of its federal revenues, according to the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.
The U.S. Treasury Department has detailed Russia’s use of a “shadow fleet” to circumvent Western sanctions and supply oil exports to a hungry European market. According to the Treasury, Russia has a fleet of 183 vessels, mainly oil tankers, that ship the country’s oil exports all over the world. In a new round of sanctions just 10 days before before the end of President Joe Biden’s term, the department expanded sanctions to include several of these vessels.
The report comes as European leaders gathered in London for an emergency conference on how the continent could continue to support Ukraine in its now three-year-long fight against a Russian invasion. It followed a contentious Oval Office meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that saw the scuttling of a key mineral deal and a precipitous decline in relations.
Since the meeting, the Trump administration has moved to reduce assistance to Kyiv. Trump has also told Zelensky that he should only return when he is ready to negotiate.
The president wasted no time in pointing out what he called the Europeans' hypocrisy, calling them out for importing Russian fossil fuels while they criticized the United States over its spat with Ukraine.
“Europe has spent more money buying Russian Oil and Gas than they have spent on defending Ukraine —BY FAR!” Trump posted to Truth Social on Monday.
The military decline of France and Britain
At the same time that Europe is continuing to fund Russia through energy revenues, the Europeans’ bold promises to increase defense responsibilities and support Ukraine with troop deployments during a ceasefire stand in stark contrast to the reality their weakened militaries face.
Since the Oval Office meeting last week, European leaders led by France’s Emmanuel Macron and the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer have proposed a new vision to increase European defense spending and take on greater security roles, without the United States in its periphery.
“For the past three years, the Russians have been spending 10 percent of their GDP on defense,” French President Macron said after meeting with Europeans at a summit in London. “We need to prepare what comes next, with an objective of 3 to 3.5 percent of GDP.”
Macron’s challenge to Europe reignites his proposal for more European strategic autonomy that he first delivered in 2017. Both Macron and Starmer have also floated sending French and British peacekeeping troops to Ukraine after a ceasefire is established, hoping to answer President Zelensky’s pleas for security guarantees.
But experts warn these former global superpowers have greatly weakened militaries and atrophied industrial bases that would make it difficult for them to go toe to toe with a peer adversary like Russia without the United States’ support.
For example, though France possesses a capable military, it lacks both the size and strategic stocks to carry on any long conflict, says Michael Shurkin, who co-authored a study for the RAND Corporation assessing the French armed forces.
Security guarantees
“[The] French military—now indisputably the most capable in Western Europe—could do a lot of things very well. But it also lacked the depth and the mass to do anything on a large scale for any length of time before it simply ran out of stuff,” Shurkin wrote in a piece summarizing the findings.
The French military, much like many of its Western European neighbors, has been in steady decline since the end of the Cold War. Boasting 15 divisions—about 300,000 troops—in the beginning of the 1990s, the French Army by 2023 had declined to just two divisions. The French navy faced a similar decline—its personnel shrunk by about half and it has only about 90 vessels, down from 147 at the end of the Cold War, the RAND study found. France also produces key military hardware at a snail's pace, making a surge in production difficult.
The United Kingdom, France’s major partner in proposing European troops on the ground in Ukraine, is also in a weakened state. “The UK is ready to play a leading role in accelerating work on security guarantees for Ukraine. This includes further support for Ukraine’s military, where the UK has already committed £3 billion a year until at least 2030,” Starmer wrote in The Telegraph earlier this month. “But it also means being ready and willing to contribute to security guarantees to Ukraine by putting our own troops on the ground if necessary.”
Experts warn that Britain does not have the military forces required to serve as a real deterrent preventing another Russian invasion of whatever is left of Ukraine.
“The weakness with Starmer’s idea is that Britain does not have the wherewithal to provide enough troops, supplies and weapons to act as a real deterrent,” wrote Kenton White, lecturer at the University of Reading School of Politics and International Relations.
“Years of spending cuts have removed the ability of British forces to prosecute a war against a peer adversary for an extended time,” White said. “The number of troops has fallen from 100,000 full-time trained personnel in 2000, to approximately 70,000 today.” Much like France, the British defense industry also faces shortfalls in productivity and capacity.
Former head of the British Army, Lord Richard Dannatt, warned that “We haven’t got the numbers and we haven’t got the equipment to put a large force onto the ground for an extended period of time at the present moment,” and that such a deployment would come at “considerable cost” to Britain, The Standard reported.
Steven Richards
Source: https://justthenews.com/government/diplomacy/europeans-are-fueling-russias-war-effort-through-gas-purchases-while-their
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