Russian gas supplies to EU member states, set to end in 2027, are by no means irreplaceable — and Italy has already replaced them entirely. Yet the temptation to return to the status quo ante in relations with Putin remains the fatal attraction of national politics.

When last Sunday Eni’s freshly reappointed CEO, Claudio Descalzi, visited the Lega’s training school — roughly speaking, the spiritual retreat for the party’s young Putinist faithful (without diminishing the more secular and colorful Putinist Woodstocks hosted by the yellow-red-green opposition, Giuseppi-style) — one could reasonably expect him to don his metaphorical flat cap, if only out of courtesy to his hosts. And one could equally expect him to declare that without Russian gas, Italy’s and Europe’s economies are doomed. Sure enough, he did exactly that.

This is, according to journalistic sources, the gist of Descalzi’s speech: “I believe it’s necessary to suspend the ban that will take effect on January 1, 2027, on the 20 billion cubic meters of LNG coming from Russia… Who is going to produce those 20 billion cubic meters as a substitute?… In a situation like this, do we really want to tell Brussels, ‘let’s stall on those 20 billion cubic meters from Russia’? Can we just take a break from hammering ourselves on the head? We can go back to it later, once we have a helmet! But for now, let’s stop drilling holes in our heads. Meanwhile, Europe says, ‘well, it’s your head.'”

A textbook compendium of anti-European grievance politics. Without Russian gas we’ll perish — but it’s the EU, not Russia, that is killing us by hammering us on the head, indifferent to our needs and to the plight of a defenseless society — helmetless — before Brussels’ arrogance.

Setting aside the fact that the much-maligned decision to decouple from Russian gas was not made in Brussels, and that Meloni’s government — Descalzi’s own shareholder — supported, like almost every other member state, the choice to rapidly free the continent’s society and economy from a criminal regime, both within and beyond its borders, it is worth examining whether the undisputed chief of the six-legged dog has even a shred of factual grounding for his alarm — whether we will all truly freeze and starve should the looming ban not be lifted and everyone return to being Moscow’s grateful energy colony.

The share of Russian gas imported by pipeline from the EU dropped from around 40% in 2021 to around 6% in 2025. Including LNG, Russian supplies in 2025 amounted to 12.5% of total EU gas imports, or 36 billion cubic metres. In Italy, gas consumption in 2025 amounted to 63.2 billion cubic metres; LNG imports amounted to about 20.9 billion cubic metres, i.e. one third of national consumption, and 90% of this came from the USA, Qatar and Algeria.

Italy has no issue whatsoever with the European ban on Russian gas, for the simple reason that it no longer consumes Russian gas in practice. This does not mean Italy faces no supply challenges — which would be better addressed starting with a revival of domestic production, currently blocked not for technical or economic reasons, but political ones — or no energy autonomy concerns. In that case, the primary structural solution lies in restarting the national nuclear program, which requires more than a decade before it can begin delivering continuous, abundant, and affordable energy. Yet the governing majority keeps talking about it without deciding anything, making the single most decisive option for breaking free from the political risks of energy markets increasingly uncertain.

Moreover, the already reduced Russian supplies to the European energy system – the 20 billion cubic metres that Descalzi speaks of – satisfied 6% of European gas consumption in 2025 and therefore do not even represent a partial solution to the emergency triggered by the war on Iran and the blockade of Hormuz, unless we are talking about quantities that are completely different from those currently imported into the EU and similar to those before 24 February 2022. This is what Descalzi’s leghist guests and Giuseppe Conte’s Pentastellati are saying: let us resume buying Russian gas, the economic convenience and political inoffensiveness of which, moreover, continue to be misunderstood.

The argument that banning Russian hydrocarbons is an act of self-harm has been circulating since 2022 among those who believe that Putin’s war against Ukraine, while perhaps morally uncomfortable, does not constitute a genuine problem — and that realistically, returning to the status quo ante of energy dependence on Moscow, even at the cost of sacrificing Ukraine and Ukrainians, represents the best guarantee of our interests. And that this would not once again become — in part because they believe it never was — a noose around Europe’s neck.

Now that Descalzi too, starting from those 20 billion cubic meters of LNG, is inviting us to engage with Russia while bracketing its wars, one cannot help but feel nostalgic for the days when Eni practiced — and championed — a foreign policy of far greater foresight and genuine strategic autonomy. Russian gas is not an independent variable from Moscow’s wars, nor merely their financial fuel. It has been, and remains, a weapon of war in its own right.