Ukraine’s decision to stop Russian natural gas from flowing through its pipelines on January 1, 2025, after a five-year transit agreement expired, has triggered a chain of retaliatory threats from neighboring countries. Hungary and Slovakia have warned they could cut off electricity and diesel deliveries to Ukraine, a move that would deepen the energy crisis caused by ongoing Russian military strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure. For millions of Ukrainians already enduring rolling blackouts and heating shortages, the dispute with their own neighbors raises the prospect of a winter defined by energy isolation on multiple fronts.
A Transit Deal Expires, and Gas Stops Flowing
The five-year agreement that allowed Russian gas to cross Ukrainian territory into Europe lapsed at the end of 2024, and Kyiv chose not to renew it. Ukraine’s energy minister Herman Halushchenko confirmed the halt, stating that the decision was made “in the interest of national security.” That framing placed the gas cutoff squarely within Ukraine’s broader war footing against Russia, treating continued transit revenue for Moscow as incompatible with the country’s defense posture. The move was not a surprise. Ukrainian officials had signaled for months that they would let the deal expire, and European buyers had spent the preceding year scrambling to secure alternative supplies, primarily through liquefied natural gas imports and pipeline deliveries from Norway and North Africa.
Still, the abrupt end of a decades-old transit route sent immediate ripple effects across Central and Southeastern Europe. Breakaway regions in Moldova lost heating and hot water almost overnight as Russian gas stopped flowing. Countries further along the pipeline, including Austria and Slovakia, faced the reality that a supply corridor they had relied on for years was now permanently closed. The question quickly shifted from whether Europe could survive without Ukrainian transit to how the countries closest to the pipeline would respond politically, particularly those whose domestic energy systems had been built around the assumption of uninterrupted Russian flows.
Slovakia and Hungary Push Back Hard
Slovakia was the first neighbor to react with open hostility. Bratislava criticized the transit halt and threatened to withhold electricity exports to Ukraine in retaliation. For Slovakia, the lost transit fees and cheap Russian gas were not abstract economic concerns. The country had positioned itself as a key distribution point for Russian energy heading into Western Europe, and the sudden end of that role struck at both its budget and its political identity. Slovak leaders framed the Ukrainian decision as a unilateral act that harmed allied nations without adequate consultation, a charge Kyiv rejected by pointing to years of advance notice and the broader security rationale behind cutting off Russian revenues.
Hungary soon joined Slovakia in escalating the standoff. Both countries threatened to halt power and diesel deliveries to Ukraine, a step that would compound the damage already inflicted by Russian missile and drone strikes on Ukrainian power plants and transmission lines. The threat carried weight because Ukraine has depended on electricity imports from its western neighbors to stabilize a grid that Russia has systematically targeted since late 2022. Cutting diesel supplies would also strain Ukrainian logistics, affecting everything from military transport to agricultural machinery during planting and harvest seasons. Even if not fully implemented, the threats themselves add uncertainty to Ukrainian planning and could deter private suppliers from entering longer-term contracts.
Why Energy Threats Hit Ukraine Harder Than They Appear
On paper, Slovakia and Hungary are mid-sized energy players whose individual contributions to Ukraine’s grid might seem manageable. In practice, the timing and context make these threats far more dangerous. Russia’s sustained campaign against Ukrainian energy infrastructure has destroyed or damaged a significant share of the country’s generating capacity, leaving the grid heavily reliant on imports during peak demand. Each winter, Ukrainian authorities impose scheduled blackouts to manage consumption, and imports from neighboring EU states have helped narrow the gap between what the grid can produce and what households and businesses need. Losing those imports during the coldest months could force longer and more frequent outages in cities already stretched thin by displacement, industrial disruption, and wartime damage.
Diesel is equally sensitive. Ukraine’s domestic refining capacity was limited even before the full-scale invasion, and wartime destruction has reduced it further. Diesel fuels not only civilian transport and heating generators but also military vehicles, field hospitals, and supply chains that move ammunition and food to the front. A cutoff from Hungary, which shares a long western border with Ukraine, would force Kyiv to find replacement supplies through more expensive or logistically difficult routes, likely driving up costs for ordinary Ukrainians who are already coping with wartime inflation and disrupted supply lines. In a conflict where mobility and resilience are central to survival, even incremental constraints on fuel availability can have outsized effects on both battlefield operations and civilian morale.
Political Fault Lines Behind the Energy Standoff
The energy threats from Budapest and Bratislava did not emerge in a vacuum. Both governments have been among the most skeptical voices inside the European Union on sanctions policy toward Russia and have repeatedly clashed with Brussels and Kyiv over the war’s direction. Hungarian leaders have maintained closer ties with Moscow than most other EU capitals, and Slovak politics have moved in a similar direction, emphasizing the economic costs of confrontation with Russia. The gas transit dispute gave both governments a concrete grievance to pair with their broader skepticism of Western support for Ukraine, allowing them to frame their retaliatory threats as defensive economic measures rather than overt geopolitical alignment with the Kremlin.
For Ukraine, the standoff exposed a tension at the heart of its wartime strategy. Kyiv needed to sever financial flows to Moscow, but doing so created friction with EU member states whose cooperation it also needed for weapons, reconstruction aid, and diplomatic backing. The European Commission found itself in an awkward position, publicly supporting Ukraine’s right to end the transit deal while privately urging restraint from Slovakia and Hungary to avoid deepening an already severe humanitarian crisis. The dispute illustrated how energy dependencies, even within a political and military alliance, can fracture solidarity when the costs are distributed unevenly and when national leaders face domestic pressure to prioritize short-term economic relief over long-term strategic cohesion.
What Comes Next for Ukraine’s Energy Security
The threats from Hungary and Slovakia may accelerate a shift that was already underway. Before the transit deal expired, Ukraine had begun investing in grid interconnections with Poland and Romania, two neighbors more aligned with Kyiv’s war aims and less dependent on Russian gas. Western donors, including the United States and the European Union, have channeled funds toward repairing Ukrainian power infrastructure and building distributed generation capacity (such as modular gas turbines, mobile diesel generators, and rooftop solar) that is harder for Russian strikes to knock offline. If the current standoff hardens into a lasting rupture with Budapest and Bratislava, those alternative pathways will become not just preferable but essential to keeping the lights on in Ukrainian cities and sustaining industrial output critical to the war effort.
The broader lesson for European energy policy is that pipeline politics did not end when the continent began phasing out Russian gas after the 2022 invasion; they simply shifted to new routes and new points of leverage. Ukraine’s decision to halt transit underscores how frontline states can use their geography to advance security goals, but it also shows how neighbors can weaponize cross-border electricity and fuel flows in response. Over the longer term, the EU’s push to diversify gas supplies, expand renewables, and strengthen cross-border interconnectors may reduce the scope for such coercion. In the meantime, however, the winter of 2025 is likely to test not only Ukraine’s physical resilience but also Europe’s political will to absorb the costs of supporting a country that has chosen to prioritize its security over the economic comfort of its neighbors.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
