Filling the Gap: The Battle for Europe’s Gas Market

Russia’s fading gas dominance in Europe won’t be inherited to one supplier, but split among competing, imperfect substitutes.

Since mid-June 2026, Ukraine has intensified its long-range drone campaign against Russian oil refineries, striking facilities in Moscow, Yaroslavl, and Krasnodar (Al Jazeera, 2026). President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has framed the campaign as a way to shrink Moscow’s war revenue and push Russia toward diplomacy, and President Vladimir Putin has for the first time publicly acknowledged a domestic fuel deficit while vowing to strengthen refinery defenses (ABC News, 2026). Days later, Ukraine struck the Slavyansk-na-Kubani refinery, which processes close to four million tonnes of crude annually and supplies fuel to occupied Crimea (Bloomberg, 2026).

These strikes are landing on an already narrowing market. The European Union’s dependence on Russian pipeline gas has collapsed from roughly 45 percent of total gas imports in 2021 to about 12-13 percent today, and Brussels adopted Regulation (EU) 2026/261 in January 2026, permanently banning short-term Russian LNG purchases from April and phasing out all pipeline imports by September 2027 (European Commission, 2026; Council of the EU, 2026). Russian pipeline flows to Europe fell 44 percent in 2025 alone, a drop described as a fifty-year low (OilPrice.com, 2025). As Ukraine’s drone campaign further squeezes Russian refining capacity, a basic energy-security question follows: who fills the gap in Europe’s supply basket, and on what terms?

Qatar’s Limits as a Substitute

Qatar is often presented as the obvious answer. Doha’s North Field, the world’s largest non-associated gas field, is being expanded from 77 million tonnes per annum (MTPA) of liquefaction capacity toward a targeted 142 MTPA by 2030, an 85 percent increase that would make Qatar one of the two largest LNG exporters alongside the United States (Baker Institute, 2024; The Middle East Insider, 2026). Baker Hughes recently secured a multi-billion-dollar contract to supply turbines and compressors for the North Field West phase, evidence that the expansion continues despite regional turmoil (Euronews, 2026a).

Yet the assumption that Qatar will simply “replace” Russia for European buyers does not hold up against either Qatari strategy or market structure. Qatari officials have said publicly that they see limited long-term upside in the European market, citing flat-to-declining EU demand projections and friction with the bloc’s supply-chain sustainability rules, which threaten fines of up to five percent of global turnover for non-compliant firms (Baker Institute, 2024; Global Finance Magazine, 2026). Most of Qatar’s uncontracted new volume is already being pre-sold to Asian buyers, and Europe’s share of Qatari cargoes fell even as EU demand rose after 2022, partly because shipping disruptions redirected cargoes toward Asia instead (EIA, 2026). More strikingly, when Iran’s regional conflict spilled into the Strait of Hormuz, QatarEnergy itself was forced to declare force majeure on long-term European contracts, since every Qatari cargo must pass through that same chokepoint (GIS Reports, 2026; The Middle East Insider, 2026). Qatar, in other words, carries a transit vulnerability that closely mirrors the one now eroding Russia’s leverage: dependence on a single, contestable corridor.

Beyond Zero-Sum: Who Actually Fills the Gap

This is where the framing matters. The competition to supply Europe’s gas is best read not as a zero-sum handover in which one exporter simply inherits Russia’s market share, but as a multiplayer market contest among Norway, the United States, Qatar, Algeria, and smaller North African and Caspian producers. Each is expanding output simultaneously, and industry projections suggest global LNG supply could exceed demand through much of the early 2030s, which would compress prices for everyone rather than crown a single winner (The Middle East Insider, 2026). Under this logic, the gap left by Russia looks less like a vacancy waiting for one successor and more like a shared prize that several mid-sized suppliers are racing, and hedging, to partially capture. Recent EU import data already show the United States, not Qatar, on track to overtake Norway as the bloc’s largest gas supplier this year, helped by a near-quadrupling of American LNG shipments to Europe since 2021 (IEEFA, 2026).

Energy also remains an instrument of state power rather than a purely commercial good. Washington has used its expanding LNG fleet to deepen European reliance on American supply chains, while Moscow continues routing residual volumes through Türkiye’s TurkStream corridor specifically to retain political leverage over Hungary, Slovakia, and Serbia even as its overall market share evaporates (Crude Accountability, 2026; Euronews, 2026b). Both patterns suggest that whichever exporters gain ground in Europe will do so partly for strategic, not only commercial, reasons.

Policy Recommendations

For European policymakers, the practical implication is to avoid concentrating replacement supply in any single exporter, Qatar included, given its shared exposure to Hormuz-related disruption. Three concrete steps follow from this. First, Brussels should formalise a diversification floor rather than relying on market forces alone: no single non-EU supplier, whether Qatar, the United States, or Norway, should be allowed to account for more than a fixed share (for instance 25-30 percent) of the bloc’s LNG imports, enforced through the EU’s joint gas-purchasing platform, AggregateEU, which already aggregates demand across member states and could be adapted to cap concentration risk. Second, the EU needs to expand regasification and storage capacity specifically in Southern and Eastern Europe, where dependence on a single corridor is highest, so that a disruption in one route, whether the Strait of Hormuz for Qatari cargoes or the Suez Canal for alternative shipments, does not immediately translate into a regional supply shock. Third, the European Commission should close the loophole that currently allows residual Russian pipeline volumes to keep flowing into Hungary and Slovakia via TurkStream ahead of the September 2027 deadline, by tying continued access to the EU single market for gas infrastructure operators to verified compliance with the phase-out schedule, rather than leaving enforcement to voluntary national reporting. Alongside these measures, faster demand reduction under the Fit for 55 framework, through accelerated heat-pump deployment and industrial efficiency mandates, would reduce the total volume that needs to be replaced in the first place, easing pressure on all suppliers simultaneously. Ukraine’s drone campaign may be shrinking Russia’s energy leverage faster than expected, but Europe’s security will ultimately rest on a diversified portfolio of imperfect substitutes, reinforced by binding concentration limits and enforceable deadlines, rather than on a single replacement for Gazprom.

References

ABC News (2026) Ukrainian strike sets fire to oil refinery in southern Russia. Available at: https://abcnews.com/International/wireStory/ukrainian-strike-sets-fire-oil-refinery-southern-russia-134286603 

Al Jazeera (2026) Ukraine says it attacked two Russian oil refineries. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/6/28/ukraine-says-it-attacked-two-russian-oil-refineries 

Baker Institute (2024) Global Energy: Qatar’s LNG Expansion. Rice University. Available at: https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/global-energy-qatars-lng-expansion 

Bloomberg (2026) Ukraine Strikes Russian Refineries in New Drone Attack. Available at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-28/ukraine-targets-russian-refineries-in-fresh-drone-strikes 

Council of the European Union (2026) Where does the EU’s gas come from? Available at: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/where-does-the-eu-s-gas-come-from/ 

Crude Accountability (2026) The EU’s Phase-Out of Russian Gas: Progress, Risks, and Security Implications. Available at: https://crudeaccountability.org/the-eus-phase-out-of-russian-gas-progress-risks-and-security-implications/ 

EIA (2026) Qatar. U.S. Energy Information Administration. Available at: https://www.eia.gov/international/content/analysis/countries_long/Qatar/ 

Euronews (2026a) Qatar pushes ahead with North Field expansion despite LNG disruptions. Available at: https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/04/28/qatar-pushes-ahead-with-north-field-expansion-despite-lng-disruptions 

Euronews (2026b) Russian gas imports rise despite EU phase-out. Available at: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/07/01/russian-gas-imports-rise-despite-eu-phase-out 

European Commission (2026) REPowerEU – phase out of Russian energy imports. Available at: https://energy.ec.europa.eu/strategy/repowereu-phase-out-russian-energy-imports_en 

GIS Reports (2026) EU bans all Russian gas for good. Available at: https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/eu-russian-energy/ 

Global Finance Magazine (2026) Qatar: LNG Riches Fuel Wider Expansion. Available at: https://gfmag.com/features/qatar-lng-riches-fuel-wider-expansion/ 

IEEFA (2026) EU Gas Flows Tracker. Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Available at: https://ieefa.org/eu-gas-flows-tracker 

NPR (2026) Ukraine hits a Moscow oil refinery and other sites in a large-scale drone attack. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2026/06/18/g-s1-128782/moscow-ukraine-drone-attack-russia-oil-refinery 

OilPrice.com (2025) Russia’s Pipeline Gas Sales to Europe Plunge to 50-Year Low. Available at: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/Russias-Pipeline-Gas-Sales-to-Europe-Plunge-to-50-Year-Low.html 

The Middle East Insider (2026) Qatar LNG 2026: Inside the $29B North Field Expansion. Available at: https://themiddleeastinsider.com/2026/04/20/qatar-lng-2026-north-field-expansion-29-billion/