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Greece is positioning itself as Europe’s southern gateway for liquefied natural gas imports, mostly from the US, as the EU prepares for a complete ban on Russian gas supplies by 2027.
Athens is betting that Greece’s geography, alongside expanded LNG capacity, infrastructure upgrades and close ties with Washington, can secure it a central role in Europe’s gas market after the Russian ban comes into force.
Before its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Moscow supplied roughly 40 per cent of the EU’s gas. By 2024, that share had fallen to about 11 per cent. Much of the gap has been filled by US LNG, which now accounts for nearly 60 per cent of the EU’s LNG imports.
“We are no longer going to fund the attacker,” said Stavros Papastavrou, Greece’s energy minister, in an interview with the FT. More work needed to be done to phase out Russian fossil fuels, he said. “This decoupling will not happen by itself.”
Since taking office in 2025, Papastavrou has pushed for closer ties with the US, presenting energy as an anchor of transatlantic relations at a time of heightened tensions between Washington and Brussels.
What began as emergency LNG deliveries from the US after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have evolved into a longer-term realignment of EU energy supplies, he said. “US energy has become a structural pillar of Europe’s security architecture.”
The EU has also dramatically cut its imports of oil from Russia. Greek-owned tankers have continued to transport Russia’s oil exports elsewhere, particularly in periods when the quoted spot oil price in Russian ports has been low enough to allow them to do so while complying with the price cap imposed by Kyiv’s allies.
Greece’s ambition to become a key entry point for US gas supplies is visible at Revithoussa, the island west of Athens that hosts Greece’s main LNG terminal. US cargo was unloading at the recently expanded terminal earlier this month.
From there, re-gasified LNG moves into the Balkans and beyond via the ‘‘vertical corridor’’, a south-to-north system set up by Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova and Ukraine after 2022, when Russia halted pipeline gas exports to Bulgaria after Sofia refused to pay in roubles.
The vertical corridor countries largely adapted existing infrastructure to make the south-to-north system, but Bulgaria is making a €400mn investment to remove bottlenecks by 2027. Before 2022, Europe’s gas had for decades flowed from north to south.
Greece began diversifying supplies before the invasion of Ukraine, said Maria Rita Galli, who was until recently chief executive of Greece’s gas grid operator, DESFA. She cited the €4.5bn TAP gas pipeline completed in 2020, linking the Greek-Turkish border to Italy via Albania and the Adriatic Sea.
“When the crisis hit, we were in a stronger position,” she said.
Athens also completed the Interconnector Greece-Bulgaria pipeline and boosted capacity with two new compressor stations in the north of the country.
For the vertical corridor, commercial signals are mixed, with near-term demand uncertain. Buyers are waiting for bottlenecks in the pipeline system to be unblocked and for EU regulations to allow for more long-term bookings.
There is higher interest for further in the future when Russian gas is expected to have been banned. LNG buyers are already booking up slots for ships to load at the terminal in Revithoussa through to 2040.
“This year was the first time the market has been very active on a long-term basis,” Galli said. “They consider Greece a strategic entry point.”
High prices are also a problem. “When you add up the tariffs from Greece through Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary — or on to Ukraine — the total becomes significant. At present, it is too high for this to be a commercially viable long-term route,” Julian Bowden, senior visiting research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, said at an FT webinar this month.
Papastavrou and other energy ministers from Vertical Corridor countries will meet their US counterpart Chris Wright in Washington on Tuesday, underscoring the Trump administration’s growing interest in the region.
US LNG, however, is structurally more expensive than prewar Russian pipeline gas and subject to global price swings.
Critics argue that Europe risks exchanging one geopolitical dependency for another. More than 80 per cent of Greece’s LNG imports in 2025 came from the US.
Bowden points out, though, that the structure of US gas exports — dispersed across multiple companies — makes political intervention far more difficult. “This is not the Kremlin pulling levers. Washington does not have the same capacity to weaponise gas supply,” he said.
Cartography by Cleve Jones
