The decision of the Trump administration to attack Venezuela, capture its president, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife, and spirit them out of the country for prosecution, killing at least 100 people in the process, is all about oil. The US president has openly stated that his goal was to place Venezuela’s oil under US control, apparently so that US-based oil companies will re-enter the country, rebuild infrastructure at the cost of tens of billions of dollars, and start pumping oil. A messy, if familiar, mix of factors continues to drive global affairs. Oil and the battle for its control are fundamental features of world politics. For decades, European leaders operated under a faulty strategic assumption that fossil fuel supplies – especially Russian gas and oil – were stable, cheap, and politically manageable. That logic collapsed the moment Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The European capitals should have known better. Fossil fuels have been the objects of war and the lubricant of aggressive foreign policies since the turn of the 20^th century.

With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, European powers and the US established oil fiefdoms in the Middle East and in South America. Oil was crucial to industry at home. British conquest and control in the Middle East and on the high seas was directly connected to oil. Algerian natural gas was essential to French strategies of colonialism. Oil triggered development of Venezuela’s Orinoco Belt during the First World War. US foreign policy has long been dedicated to keeping oil from the Middle East flowing into tankers bound for the US and Europe – at a cost of trillions of dollars. And oil and gas have financed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – just as natural and mineral resources have supported Russian empire building since the 18th century.

Since the time of Catherine the Great, Russia has pushed its borders in the hunt for hydrocarbons. Russian rulers colonised Siberia, the Far East and Far North, regions that the tsars, commissars and now oligarchs perceived as empty of people, but rich in resources. Russian leaders have long recognised the centrality of hydrocarbon resources in projecting state power, culminating in the efforts of Vladimir Putin to convert oil and gas into tools of Russian military strategy in the invasion of Ukraine.

Russian-European pipeline dependencies date to 1955 when West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer visited Moscow to establish diplomatic relations, followed by a trade agreement in 1958. The ensuing trade was based on exchanging Russian fossil fuels for German technology; Russia may be resource rich, but except for its space and nuclear industries it is hardly a competitor in commerce. The Soviets couldn’t produce high-strength, single-walled, low-alloy steel pipes like the West. The West Germans met soaring Soviet demand for large-diameter pipes through a 1970 agreement. European energy companies and financial institutions negotiated to pay for the construction of a 3,000-mile pipeline from the Tiumen region of Siberia to the Soviet border, where it was linked to existing European distribution lines.

From the start, critics worried – rightly, it turned out – that Western Europe would become dependent on the Soviet gas that started flowing in 1973. One acute danger was that the West German economy would become overly reliant on industrial Soviet orders. In addition, US and European observers worried about the ability of Moscow to force compliance with Soviet diktats by threatening to turn off pipelines and make Europe freeze. Moscow did make Poland freeze in the early 1980s to cool the Solidarność movement. The US remained skeptical of German-Soviet economic cooperation, especially under Presidents Carter and Reagan, following the Soviet attack on Afghanistan.

Siberian gas has been simultaneously a benefit and a bane to the European energy market. Critical to Germany, Italy, France, and Turkey to power industry and heat homes, the growing dependence on Russian supplies became clear as a risk in the 2010s as Putin adopted an increasingly belligerent foreign policy. Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, over half of Germany’s natural gas came through Russian pipelines. Those supplies have now been used as a form of blackmail and a source of income for the Kremlin to carry out its wars of aggression. Under Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany comforted itself with the reassuring rationalisation that it could achieve ‘Wandel durch Handel’ – ‘change through trade’. Indeed, on the eve of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz opposed banning imports of gas as essential for Europe’s ‘heat generation, mobility, power supply and industry.’

Several nations of Eastern Europe have historical dependence on Russian gas because of their subjugation as socialist colonies of the USSR. The massive ‘Druzhba’ (Friendship) pipeline, one of the largest in the world at over 4,000 km, began operation in 1964, carrying oil from West Siberian fields to the COMECON Eastern European nations. The European Commission has ordered Druzhba imports to cease no later than 2027 in spite of objections from Slovakia and Hungary, the two most pro-Russian European nations in the European Union, who rely on ‘Druzhba’ for oil under temporary EU sanctions exemptions. Speeding an end to dependence, Ukraine has targeted Druzhba pumping stations, most recently in December 2025 in the Tambov region. Slovakia and Hungary have pleaded with Ukraine not to bomb the pipeline.

Pipelines across Ukraine are another flash point for war. For obvious reasons, Ukraine has long sought energy independence from Russia. Ukraine produces its own gas, imports much of it from Uzbekistan, and before the invasion in 2022 received significant imports from Russia. Direct imports stopped after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, but continued through resale. Ukraine also earned substantial fees for transiting pipeline gas from Russia to Europe, which in 2005-06 led to a dispute when Ukraine siphoned some of this gas for domestic use.

Russian gas and European customers have an increasingly precarious relationship over the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, built by Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned gas enterprise. Nord Stream 1, which started operation in 2010, enters Europe from Vyborg, Russia, a city conquered by Stalin from Finland during the Second World War. It was a pet project of German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder who, in November 2005, just weeks before stepping down as Germany’s chancellor, signed the pipeline deal with Russia, and then received a plum position with Gazprom. Schröder, the pipeline, and possible Russian ‘interventions in favour of the project’, which shielded companies involved in building it from US sanctions, are under investigation.

Nord Stream 2 runs from Ust-Luga in northwestern Russia near Estonia, another country that Stalin subjugated to the USSR during the Second World War along with Latvia and Lithuania. Nord Stream 2 was completed in 2021, but has not entered service. US President Joe Biden joined Scholz to hobble the project in February 2022, following Russia’s attempted annexation of parts of Ukraine. In September 2022 explosions damaged the Nord Stream pipelines. A Ukrainian man suspected of coordinating the pipeline attack was arrested by Italian police in August 2025, and extradited to Germany in November, where he is being held in custody pending prosecution.

From 2022, the European Union has used sanctions to lessen the ability of Russia to earn oil and gas to fund the war and to end its reliance on Russian fossil fuels. Russian oil quickly disappeared from the European market, and secondary sanctions restricted Moscow’s ability to reroute barrels even to Asia and the Middle East.

Sanctions against Russia fall into three categories, largely intended to cut Russian exports and lower the price of oil that Russia can earn on sales abroad. The sanctions include restrictions on Russian imports of goods and services, especially in high tech areas, limits on exports, and targeted sanctions against individuals, including Putin’s corrupt billionaire oligarchs, their children, their corporations, and their ability to bank internationally. A price cap on crude oil was recently lowered from $60 to $47.60/barrel, with a new mechanism to adjust the oil price cap every six months to keep it 15 per cent below the market price for Russian crude oil.

Pipelines were not the only targets. Other sanctions were directed to slow, if not stop, the flow of oil through the world’s tanker fleet. Russia has been using a ‘shadow fleet’ of unregulated, aging tankers. EU sanctions have added more and more boats suspected of illegal shipments, now totaling 1,400 vessels, and Ukraine has begun targeting them with drone attacks. It may be noted that the US blockaded tankers shipping Venezuelan oil in preparation for Trump’s January 2026 attacks on the country. And in a dramatic intervention, US forces subsequently seized two shadow-fleet oil tankers, in the north Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea, that were caught in the act of breaking this blockade.

It has been difficult to ensure the full effect of the sanctions because of loopholes that allowed Russian oil and gas to flow to Europe during a transition period; a general hesitancy to risk higher energy prices; and flaws in the price cap. Pipeline oil and natural gas were essentially exempt for some time to give EU countries a period in which to diversify their supplies. Some EU member states purchased petroleum products made from Russian crude oil in such countries as India and Turkey instead. Ultimately, however, the sanctions reshaped international oil and gas markets to the detriment of Russia.

The world’s fossil fuel economy is a strategic tool like any other. Indeed, the 27 European Union countries, the US, and Australia deployed a series of strategic measures to use oil, gas and related technologies as a weapon against Russian designs on Ukraine. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said: ‘For the first time we are hitting Russia’s gas sector – the heart of its war economy.’

The EU import ban forced Russia to find new buyers for its oil. One analyst noted, ‘The geography of Russian oil exports has changed completely … [as] the new buyers have been enticed with substantial price discounts.’ China, India and other countries have taken over as major buyers of Russian fossil fuels. China is also accepting increased LNG deliveries coinciding with increased production at Novatek’s Arctic LNG 2 project that was targeted by US sanctions in 2024.

It may be that cheap energy from the USSR and mutually beneficial trade spurred European growth and kept military budgets down during the Détente period of the Cold War. But those military budgets were huge, no matter how measured. In all events, reliance on Russian gas foreclosed earlier diversification and the transition to renewables, and hindered the implementation of effective sanctions after the 2014 and 2022 interventions into Ukraine. Linking Europe’s economies to the Siberian and Yamal gas fields, and Arctic oil platforms through pipelines and tankers ultimately proved to be unsustainable, as Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine continues to demonstrate. This analysis of the intersection of oil, war and politics in Europe and Russia – and to a certain extent over the control of oil in Venezuela – leaves no doubt that the reliance of the world’s economies on fossil fuels is a mixed blessing.