Europe Is Buying More Russian Gas Again and the Iran War Made It Happen

It is a pattern the planet can ill afford to repeat. According to Reuters, Russian pipeline gas exports to Europe rose 22 percent year on year in March 2026. The trigger is the Iran war. With the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed to most shipping, roughly 20 percent of the world’s daily oil and LNG supply vanished from global markets almost overnight. Europe, already entering the storage refill season with reserves sitting below 30 percent, found itself scrambling for supply. And Russia, via the TurkStream pipeline running under the Black Sea through Turkey, was available.

Total Russian gas supplies reached 1.7 billion cubic meters in March, up from 1.4 billion in the same month last year. As Al Jazeera reported, Vladimir Putin wasted no time, publicly offering renewed long-term gas cooperation with European customers who spent four years deliberately unwinding their dependence on him following the invasion of Ukraine.

This is the trap that fossil fuel dependence sets again and again. Europe broke one addiction only to face the conditions for another. The Atlantic Council warned this is the same playbook as 2022, different conflict but the same dilemma over energy. Every time geopolitical crisis hits fossil fuel supply chains, vulnerable nations are forced to choose between bad and worse.

The only exit from this loop is a genuine transition to renewable energy. No war closes the sun. No missile strikes a wind farm at sea. The earth offers cleaner, safer energy in abundance. The choice to keep depending on authoritarian fossil fuel exporters is political, not practical.

Demand that your government treats renewable energy as a security issue and speeds up the transition before the next crisis locks us in again.

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