One popular US narrative today is that “EU is buying Russian gas and oil, why don’t they stop” which is used as an argument why US stopped helping #Ukraine and is so friendly with Putin. The problem is that if you look at the numbers, the argument is quite manipulative on many levels:

• EU as an institution on its own is not importing anything from #Russia, quite the opposite, the EU - again, as an institution - had just pushed 19th sanctions package further limiting imports… of its Member States
• Member States legally delegate some policies to EU, but energy policies are the most prominent example of policies that are exempt from this delegation and mostly kept to Member States
• each EU sanctions package has to be approved by all Member States, and this is where the main challenge appears because the sanctions are agreed by a consensus of 27 members
• each sanctions package had been historically blocked by #Hungary and #Slovakia and watered down by #France #Germany #Italy #Netherlands
• nonetheless, EU Member States had since 2021 reduced their imports from Russia by 90% and most fuel imports will be completely stopped in 2027

How does it look now? As of 2025 these were the largest EU importers from Russia:

• Germany: ~€2B, mostly fertilizers/titanium
• Netherlands: ~€2.3B, energy-focused
• France: ~€2.5B LNG/energy
• Italy: ~€3-4B energy/fertilizers

Why they do it? On moral grounds it annoys me especially that some of these countries voluntarily sleepwalked into a huge strategic energy dependence of Russia in spite of decades of warnings. Probably each of them has a different set of reasons, like keeping fuel & food prices acceptable. What is important is that these numbers represent only ~10% of the pre-2022 imports, so these countries had already done huge effort to cut funding of Russian budget.

Now about USA - they love to patronise Europe but they’re of course… also importing from Russia. USA imports enriched uranium at around ~$1B per year and only plans to stop in 2028. Why? Most likely because thanks to decades of Rosatom price dumping most countries decided their own enrichment is too expensive and scaled it down - USA of course has its enrichment facilities from old times, but they need time to be restarted, just like France.

But at the end of the day, why should we limit imports from Russia? This one is easy and the answer was already given by Lenin in his famous quote about “hanging bourgeois on the rope they sell us”.

Russia’s war spending is now 40% of its whole budget and it doesn’t just include the war in Ukraine but also all the cyber-attacks, disinformation, political interference, sabotage, explosions, arson targeted at Europe and USA.

You want less explosives planted by Russians in DHL planes flying over European towns? Buy less Russian oil and gas, because every euro you “saved” on buying it will be eventually turned against you.

Also, the sooner Russia runs out of money for the war in Ukraine, the sooner it will be ready for an actual peace deal.