The Eastern enlargements of the EU increased the bloc’s dependency on Russian gas and contributed to a more cautious attitude towards these supplies. This paper assesses the Russian gas dependency of the 11 Central and East European new member states according to the ambition and execution of their national energy strategies. Two composite indicators of gas dependency – one for supply and one for demand – were used for this evaluation, beginning with the 2004 EU
enlargement and ending in 2019, the last available full year before two large crises: the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s war against Ukraine. The main conclusions are that the new member states mostly reduced their gas dependency through supply-side measures, while the old member states increased dependency through some combination of worsening supply- or demand-side situation. New gas infrastructure capacity has contributed to the supply and route diversification of new member states from Russia, but reducing gas demand did not receive much attention until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The publication is avaliable in Hungarian at Külgazdaság 68. évfolyam 2024/5-6.