Against this backdrop of ruptured pipelines and redirected cargo, a question once confined to trading desks now shapes national budgets: can Russia actually replace Europe with Asia? A study published in Nature Communications in January 2025 modeled the possibilities and reached a sober conclusion. Even if Moscow pulls off a full pivot to Asian buyers, its gas exports in 2040 still land between 13 and 38 percent below their 2020 level. Where new markets stay limited, the fall runs between 31 and 47%.
The rupture itself was fast. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 cut pipeline supplies to Europe to roughly 20 percent of their pre-war level, as Gazprom withdrew from the spot market and cut off long-term customers who refused to pay in roubles. Sanctions closed the Yamal-Europe pipeline to Germany, and the Nord Stream 1 and 2 lines stopped operating after explosions. Before the war, the numbers ran the other way: the EU sourced 40% of the gas it burned from Russian pipelines in 2021, and Europe absorbed 66% of Russia’s pipeline exports.
Europe Pays, and So Do Bystanders
What is at stake was visible in the bills. Prices hit records in the summer of 2022, and EU governments eventually earmarked more than €540 billion shielding consumers. A mild winter, softer Asian demand and a working global LNG market then spared Europe the worst for the winter that followed. The damage migrated: poorer importers such as Pakistan and Bangladesh were priced out of the LNG market, suffered shortages and in places switched back to coal. The study notes that consumers and politicians had received, in its words, “a crash course in gas market dynamics and geopolitics” as early as 2021, when Gazprom declined to refill European storage.
Europe’s answer, the REPowerEU programme announced in May 2022, targets independence from Russian fossil fuels by 2027. A surge of new LNG supply, mainly from the US and Qatar, could ease prices from 2026 onward.
The Arithmetic of the Pivot
Russia has shipped pipeline gas to Europe for almost 60 years, beginning in the 1960s with gas-for-pipe deals that opened West Siberia to Western buyers. The eastward leg is younger and thinner. The 2014 deal worth $400 billion built Power of Siberia 1, which began flowing to China in 2019 and is due to hit its 38 bcm capacity by 2025. A proposed Power of Siberia 2, running 3,550 kilometers with 50 bcm of capacity from the Yamal Peninsula, has won no agreement. A 10 bcm Sakhalin line signed in 2022 is due by 2027. Export prices are unpublished, but the researchers judge it highly unlikely that Chinese trade is as profitable as the European business Russia lost.
The model’s lesson is that Beijing holds the leverage, with “the degrees of its success contingent on China’s strategy”. A protracted war scenario leaves Russia cut off by 2027 with no new pipelines; even a ceasefire scenario, in which transit through Ukraine ends after 2025 and TurkStream carries at most 15 bcm, leaves Russia pumping far less than before. Higher Chinese demand barely improves the picture, and China, wary of dependence, keeps diversifying. The pivot is real. The study’s point is that it cannot be complete.
