13.5m households freeze amid record EU gas imports
EU governments paid Russia roughly €6bn for record Yamal gas imports as 13.5 million UK households fall into fuel poverty.
UK households are paying record energy bills while EU governments spend record sums on EU Russia gas imports.
The energy price cap rose by £221 on 1 July, taking the average annual household bill to £1,862. The End Fuel Poverty Coalition says 13.5 million UK households now spend more than a tenth of their income on energy, up from 11.3 million in April. Bills are more than 70% higher than in winter 2020-21, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
EU Russia gas imports hit a record
In the same six months, the EU’s Russia gas imports hit a record: 9.89 million tonnes of liquefied natural gas from Russia’s Yamal plant, according to the Financial Times, up 18% on the year before and close to the plant’s entire output. European buyers paid Russia around €6bn for it.
France took 3.6 million tonnes, Belgium 2.9 million and Spain 2.7 million, according to shipping-data firm Kpler. The Belgian port of Zeebrugge alone received a Yamal cargo roughly every five days in the first months of the year.
Who owns the plant
Yamal LNG is 50.1% owned by Russia’s Novatek. France’s TotalEnergies holds a 20% stake, and Chinese state entities, CNPC and the Silk Road Fund, hold the rest. Novatek faces no EU sanctions; only US restrictions dating to 2014 apply. The EU banned new short-term Russian LNG contracts in April, but long-term contracts, the kind driving the current buying, stay legal until a full import ban takes effect on 1 January 2027.
Cutting the imports abruptly could have pushed wholesale prices higher still, and the surge looks more like stockpiling ahead of the ban than the sole driver of British bills, which also reflect global market shocks and supplier charges. Nobody broke sanctions law. The point is that a policy sold to bill-payers as shared sacrifice for four years ran alongside record cheques to Moscow.
Novatek, TotalEnergies and Chinese state funds took their share of that €6bn while a family in Sheffield or Southampton decided which room to heat this winter. The sacrifice was never shared. It was billed.
