Europe Wants to Break with Russia, but Spain Is Buying More Gas from Moscow

Spain has increased its purchases of Russian gas just months before the European Union is due to close its doors to Russian liquefied natural gas imports. The shift exposes a new contradiction in Europe’s effort to reduce its dependence on Moscow.

Spanish imports of Russian gas reached 37,172 gigawatt hours during the first six months of 2026, according to data from CORES, the country’s strategic petroleum products reserve agency overseen by the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge. That was 41.8% higher than the 26,208 GWh recorded in the same period the previous year.

The increase did not reflect a comparable jump in Spain’s overall gas demand. Total imports stood at about 189,091 GWh in the first half of 2026, almost unchanged from a year earlier, according to data reported by Estrella Digital. The major change was the origin of the supply. Russia filled a larger share of the market as deliveries from the Middle East were disrupted.

The Strait of Hormuz became central to that change. The waterway connects the Persian Gulf with the Arabian Sea and is a key route for Qatar’s LNG exports. After the U.S.-Iran conflict began in late February and shipping through Hormuz was disrupted, Qatar’s LNG exports suffered a major blow. Reuters, citing energy intelligence company ICIS, reported that Qatar shipped only 18 LNG cargoes during the first six months of the war, compared with 509 in the same period a year earlier, a decline of about 96%.

Qatar had supplied about one-fifth of the world’s daily traded LNG and had become an important alternative for European countries trying to move away from Russian gas. El Pais reported that Spain had received no new Qatari deliveries since the crisis began. Europe’s effort to abandon Russian energy because of the war in Ukraine has therefore collided with a separate Middle East conflict that disrupted one of its most important replacement suppliers.