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Germany is still buying significant amounts of Russian liquefied natural gas via other EU countries despite Berlin turning away direct shipments of Russian fuel, a report has found.
German national energy company Sefe bought 58 cargoes of Russian LNG, through the French port of Dunkirk last year — more than six times the figure in 2023, according to a report by Belgian, German and Ukrainian NGOs.
The challenge of tracing Russian gas through the EU’s energy system has become a critical issue as the bloc tries to wean itself off Russian fossil fuels. Following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago, which pushed energy prices in the EU to record highs, Brussels set a nominal target of expunging all Russian fuel from the bloc by 2027.
Imports of seaborne Russian gas, which have not been banned, hit a record high in 2024. Only around 10 per cent of the EU’s piped gas came from Russia in 2024, according to European Commission figures, while Russian coal and almost all Russian oil were sanctioned.
Energy ministers from Belgium, France and Spain, whose ports receive shipments from Russian LNG tankers, have insisted that very little of the gas arriving is used domestically and that most is piped on to other EU countries. In November, Germany ordered its state-operated import terminals to reject any Russian LNG cargoes.
“Germany has prohibited the import of Russian LNG at its ports. But imports officially sourced from France and Belgium are in fact partly composed of Russian LNG, effectively whitewashing the gas,” said Angelos Koutsis, energy policy officer at Belgian think-tank Bond Beter Leefmilieu, which helped produce the report.
“The end result is that all countries involved can claim not to be responsible for the still increasing demand for Russian LNG.”
The report, which was also compiled by German environmental groups Deutsche Umwelthilfe and Urgewald, and Ukrainian NGO Razom We Stand, suggests that the country is still receiving between 3 and 9.2 per cent of its gas supply from Russia via other EU countries.
A lack of transparency in the EU’s internal gas market has led to “finger-pointing among member states, which has led to inaction against Russian LNG as no member state feels fully responsible”, it added.
Gas transported from Belgian ports, for example, is generally labelled “Belgian gas” in official German databases despite Belgium having no gas production of its own.
Sefe, which was owned by Russian state gas company Gazprom until it was nationalised in 2022, said it did not disclose sales numbers and so could neither confirm nor deny the findings of the report. It has a long-term contract with Russia’s Yamal LNG, led by private energy group Novatek, while it may have bought some cargoes from traders.
“Once delivered into the European gas network, the molecules cannot be tracked. It is therefore impossible to know where exactly the gas that gets delivered in Dunkirk ends up,” Sefe said.
The German economy ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
France and nine other EU countries called in October for countries to publish information on suppliers that import LNG from Russia and the volumes coming into EU ports.
Tracking the source of gas entering the EU is achievable through legally mandated transparency data, said Tom Marzec-Manser, an independent gas analyst.
But “it is once the gas, or regassified LNG, begins to travel within the internal market that it becomes especially difficult to untangle where the gas has commercially been delivered,” he said.
“This would require each shipper to declare such information for every hour of the day for each network, which would be incredibly burdensome,” Marzec-Manser added.
