President Donald Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have urged Kyiv and European capitals to consider resuming Russian gas flows through Ukraine’s pipeline network as part of a peace settlement. The suggestion followed a US announcement of a deal to buy 2.25 million barrels of Russian diesel and reports of discussion around the surviving Nord Stream 2 string.
Ukraine would likely accept transit under a ceasefire. It permitted Russian gas to continue flowing after the February 2022 invasion until 1 January 2025, moving 15–16 billion cubic metres in 2024 and booking over $1 billion under the prior contract. Russia’s oil and gas revenues fell 23.8 percent in 2025 to 8.48 trillion rubles, with a further 17.2 percent year-on-year drop in the first nine months of 2026, and the end of Ukrainian transit cost Gazprom up to $4.5 billion annually. Yet Moscow earlier cut Nord Stream supplies for political leverage and has not moderated its territorial aims. An EU regulation now phases out Russian pipeline gas from autumn 2027. Economic cooperation offered before a verified ceasefire would reward aggression without securing behavioural change.
The proposal treats commercial gain as a lever capable of altering Russian war aims. Revenue shortfalls of the scale recorded in 2025 and 2026 have not produced that effect. Pipeline export income ranks below the regime’s ideological and territorial priorities, so an early gas arrangement functions mainly as sanctions relief rather than a bargaining chip for a ceasefire.
Germany’s earlier policy of Wandel durch Handel and the construction of the two Nord Stream lines already tested the same premise. Expanded energy interdependence did not constrain the 2014 annexation of Crimea or the 2022 full-scale invasion. The pattern shows that trade links alone leave the expansionist impulse intact when it is treated as a core regime interest.
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