Europe Bought 5.1m Tonnes of Russian Yamal LNG in Q1, 97% of Its Arctic Output

Europe Bought 5.1m Tonnes of Russian Yamal LNG in Q1, 97% of Its Arctic Output EU buyers paid Russia EUR 2.9bn for Arctic LNG in the first quarter, up from 4.3m tonnes a year earlier, even as Brussels pledges to cut Moscow's gas revenue. Europe remains the destination for nearly all of Russia's flagship Arctic LNG. Some 97% of all Yamal LNG deliveries in the first quarter of 2026 went to the EU, environmental group Urgewald said on Friday (2026-05-15), with member states paying EUR 2.9bn for roughly 5.1m tonnes, or 6.9 bcm.¹ That matters because it sits awkwardly against the EU's stated goal of starving the Kremlin of energy revenue. The Q1 volume was up from 4.3m tonnes in the same period last year, meaning European purchases of Russian Arctic gas grew rather than shrank, even as the bloc continues to frame Russian supply as something to phase out.¹ Yamal is Russia's primary export terminal for cargoes into the Atlantic basin, and the Q1 figures show how dependent that route still is on European buyers. Urgewald called Europe the indispensable market for the project. Strip out EU demand and there is no obvious home of equivalent size for those tonnes.¹ The numbers also expose the limit of Russia's pivot east. Moscow has spent the past year advertising closer energy ties with Beijing, including a new agreement to advance the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline confirmed by Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller during Vladimir Putin's visit to China.⁵ Analysts read that announcement mainly as a diplomatic gesture, a chance for the two governments to underline their relationship and for China to snub seaborne US LNG, rather than a near-term volume shift.⁴ Pipeline ambitions aside, the underlying production picture is softening. Russian natural and associated gas output reached roughly 334.8 bcm by mid-year, a decline of 3.2% against the same stretch last year, according to federal statistics cited by Bloomberg.² LNG production fell harder, down 5.1% to around 16.5m tonnes over the period.² Power of Siberia flows are projected to rise more than 20% this year toward the line's maximum 38 bcm annual capacity.² But that pipeline runs to China, not the Atlantic, and even at full tilt it does not replace the European LNG market that Yamal serves. The eastward and westward franchises are separate businesses with separate customers. For European buyers, the awkward arithmetic is that cutting Yamal cargoes means replacing them. The continent's post-Russian system is increasingly built around Norwegian supply, the most strategically valuable molecules on offer given their political reliability.³ Equinor's deals illustrate the scale of substitution required: a recent long-term contract with Eneco delivers roughly 2.2 TWh a year, equivalent to about 0.2 bcm.³ Against 6.9 bcm of Russian LNG in a single quarter, the replacement math is daunting. New Atlantic supply is coming, but slowly. Canada reached what officials called a milestone deal to sell LNG from the Ksi Lisims project to Germany, part of Berlin's effort to diversify away from both Russian and US dependence.⁶ These are multi-year build-outs, not spot replacements for cargoes arriving at European terminals now. The consensus across the available signals is bearish for Russian gas as a European fixture, even if the Q1 data shows the opposite in the short run. The direction of travel points to displacement by Norwegian pipe gas and new Atlantic LNG. The pace is the open question. So is enforcement. The EU's own Q1 spend undercuts the narrative of a clean break, and as long as Yamal cargoes clear at European terminals, the windfall continues. Watch whether Q2 volumes confirm the year-on-year increase or reverse it, and whether any sanctions or import restriction actually bites into the flow rather than just the rhetoric.¹ For now the trade is straightforward to describe and hard to unwind. Russia ships Arctic LNG west because that is where the buyers are. Europe buys it because the alternatives are not yet at scale. Both sides know the relationship is meant to end. Neither has moved decisively to end it.