The European Commission’s plan to set 2027 as the deadline for cancelling energy contracts with Russia must be seen from a strategic perspective. The strategy of the Anglo-Saxon maritime powers for 150 years has been to prevent Russia and European countries, especially Germany, from establishing economic and political ties with each other. The purpose of this containment of Russia was to prevent Germany from combining its industrial potential with Russia’s vast natural resources, which would create too great a concentration of economic and geopolitical power for Britain and the United States to compete with.
The war in Ukraine, the root cause of which is NATO’s eastward expansion, has already effectively severed economic and political ties between Russia and EU member states. The European Commission’s goal of banning Russian gas imports into the EU is to finalise this separation.
Some EU member states, such as Finland, do not care what consequences the EU’s anti-Russian decisions will have on their economy or sovereignty. They are willing to follow them, whatever it takes.
However, this plan is directed against member states such as Hungary and Slovakia, which are willing to maintain energy co-operation with Russia due to the affordable price of Russian gas and the high quality of Russian nuclear power plant technology. The aim of the European Commission and the large EU member states is to reduce the strategic sovereignty of these member states, make them more vulnerable to pressure from Brussels and thus undermine their ability to resist development towards building an EU federation.
This plan, if adopted, has the potential to increase the level of opposition to the EU in the eastern and south-eastern member states, particularly Bulgaria.
