Five states, 28 bcm, no coastline

The European Union has five landlocked members. Austria, Czechia, Hungary and Slovakia sit in a block across central Europe; Luxembourg is a rounding error attached to Belgium’s grid. Eurostat’s 2024 balances put their combined inland gas consumption at 28.0 billion cubic metres, 8.3 per cent of the EU’s 337.4 bcm. Individually none of them is large. Hungary, the biggest, burns about a tenth of what Germany does.

Size is not the point. The point is the second column that does not appear in any consumption table: how the gas arrives. Germany, Italy, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Belgium, Greece and Croatia can all receive a cargo at a regasification terminal. The landlocked five cannot, at any price, under any policy. Their gas is whatever their neighbours will move for them, and it enters their systems only after crossing at least one border and paying at least one tariff.

That dependence runs the other way too, and it is why these four central European states matter more than 8.3 per cent suggests. Austria’s Baumgarten and Slovakia’s network were built as the corridor through which Soviet gas reached western Europe. Being a transit country was the whole business model. When transit stops, the arithmetic underneath their tariffs breaks — which is the part of this story almost nobody outside the industry follows.

A pipeline called Brotherhood

The infrastructure question was settled sixty years ago. In December 1964 the Soviet Union signed the contract for an export pipeline west; in 1967 the first gas crossed into Czechoslovakia. The line was called Bratstvo — Brotherhood.

The commercially decisive step came the following year. On 1 June 1968 Soyuznefteexport and Austria’s OMV signed a long-term supply agreement, the first time Soviet energy was sold to western Europe. A 6.5-kilometre spur was laid from Vysoká in Czechoslovakia to Baumgarten in Austria, and gas was flowing within three months.

Which is to say it arrived in about September 1968 — a few weeks after Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into the country the pipeline ran through. The Prague Spring was crushed in August; the gas kept moving. That is the founding fact of this entire arrangement, and everyone who has argued since 2022 that energy trade with Moscow is separable from politics has been drawing, knowingly or not, on the precedent set in 1968.

The system as it stood before the ruptures: Brotherhood and Soyuz crossing Ukraine into Slovakia and on to Baumgarten, with Yamal–Europe through Belarus and Poland. Solid lines were built; dashed ones were proposals. Drawn in 2009, so South Stream here was later cancelled, and the map predates Nord Stream 2, TurkStream and the closure of the Ukrainian route in 2025 — which is exactly why it is useful for reading the history. Source: Samuel Bailey, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0 NZ.

The system then grew into the shape it still has. The Urengoy–Pomary–Uzhhorod line was commissioned in 1984, running from western Siberia through Ukraine and Slovakia to Baumgarten. Baumgarten became the Central European Gas Hub, the pricing point for the region. Hungary, Slovakia, Austria and Czechia did not choose Russian gas so much as inherit a grid that had been designed, in an era when their governments were not consulted, to deliver it.

The night the northern route was destroyed

Before the eastern route closed by decision, the northern one was closed by explosives. On 26 September 2022 underwater blasts in the Baltic near the Danish island of Bornholm ruptured three of the four pipelines making up Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2, releasing an enormous quantity of methane and putting the largest single conduit for Russian gas to Europe permanently out of service. Nord Stream 2 had never entered commercial operation. One line of it, Pipe B, was not damaged and remains physically intact — a working Russian gas route to Germany that is closed by politics rather than by engineering.

For the landlocked four the sabotage mattered indirectly, which is why it is usually left out of their story. Nord Stream did not serve them. It served Germany — and Germany is the country they now expect to import through. Removing 55 billion cubic metres a year of pipeline capacity into the German system did not just end a Russian route; it turned Germany from a country with surplus piped gas into a competitor for the same LNG cargoes that Austria, Czechia, Hungary and Slovakia need to buy at second hand. The German storage problem described further down is, in part, a consequence of what happened on the seabed off Bornholm.

The wider effect is easier to measure. Russia’s share of EU pipeline gas imports fell from more than 40 per cent in 2021 to roughly 11 per cent by 2024. Some of that was policy. A material part of it was that the pipes stopped existing.

Who did it remains before a court, and the answer is politically awkward for everyone. Sweden and Denmark closed their investigations in February 2024 without charges, leaving German federal prosecutors as the only active inquiry. Germany’s working theory is that the operation was ordered by Ukrainian state entities; Kyiv denies involvement. By September 2025 investigators had reportedly identified seven suspects, several linked to a private diving school in Kyiv.

Two arrests have followed. Serhii Kuznietsov, a former Ukrainian military officer, was detained in Italy in August 2025, extradited after Italy’s highest court approved the transfer, and handed to German custody on 27 November 2025; he was indicted in Hamburg on 30 June 2026, accused of leading the operation and commanding the yacht Andromeda that carried the dive team. He is awaiting trial and denies having been anywhere near the Baltic. On 19 August 2026 a second Ukrainian, described by prosecutors as a trained scuba diver, was arrested in Pula, Croatia on a European arrest warrant, and Germany is seeking his extradition. He had been held in Poland in September 2025 and released when a Polish court refused to hand him over.

That Polish refusal is the detail worth holding onto. One EU member state is prosecuting the destruction of an energy pipeline as a serious crime while another declined to extradite for it — a disagreement about whether sabotaging an adversary’s infrastructure during a war is a criminal act at all. It is the same fault line, in a different court, as the argument over whether banning Russian gas is an energy measure or a sanction.

Meanwhile the surviving pipe keeps the question open. Washington and Moscow have discussed reviving Nord Stream, and a restart is periodically floated as part of any Ukraine settlement. Berlin says repeatedly that it is not in talks, and reversing course would mean working around US sanctions, EU opposition and the diplomatic cost with Kyiv. It would also now run into the phase-out regulation, which makes Russian pipeline gas illegal in the EU from 30 September 2027 whatever the state of the steel on the seabed.

1 January 2025: the tap the map depended on

The 2019 Gazprom–Naftogaz transit agreement expired on 31 December 2024 and Ukraine declined to renew it. On 1 January 2025 Russian gas stopped crossing Ukraine. The route that had defined central European supply since 1967 closed, not by EU sanction, but by the decision of the transit country.

What survived was TurkStream, which runs under the Black Sea to Turkey and north through Bulgaria and Serbia into Hungary. It is now the only pipeline carrying Russian gas into the EU, and it made Hungary and Slovakia the bloc’s largest remaining buyers of it — Slovakia resuming Russian imports by that route within weeks of the Ukrainian halt.

Two of the four went the other way. Austria’s OMV terminated its Gazprom contract outright in December 2024, citing fundamental breaches, ending a supply agreement signed in 2006 that was to have run to 2040; Gazprom had already stopped delivering to OMV on 16 November 2024. Czechia ended Russian pipeline gas from January 2025 and Russian crude by mid-2025 once the TAL-PLUS expansion was complete, becoming, by the end of 2025, fully independent of Russian oil and gas for the first time in its modern history. The same geography produced opposite outcomes, which is worth remembering whenever landlocked status is offered as an explanation for anything.

The carrot and the stick

On 26 January 2026 the Council gave final approval to a stepwise ban on Russian gas, published as Regulation (EU) 2026/261 on 2 February. Russian LNG imports end on 31 December 2026; Russian pipeline gas on 30 September 2027.

The vote is the story. It passed by qualified majority, 24 to 2 — Hungary and Slovakia against, Bulgaria abstaining. Energy policy taken by QMV rather than unanimity is precisely what the two dissenters object to, because a sanctions measure would require unanimity and each of them would then hold a veto. Slovakia has taken that argument to court: Robert Fico’s government is challenging the regulation on the ground that a measure whose effect is to cut Russian energy revenue is a sanction in substance, whatever it is called in form. The European Parliament had already, in November 2025, rejected the idea of writing exemptions for landlocked countries into the text.

Hungary and Slovakia did extract something: a derogation letting them keep importing Russian pipeline oil until September 2027, granted explicitly on the grounds of their landlocked position and limited alternatives.

The carrot arrived from a different direction entirely, and it is much larger. Roughly €18 billion of EU money had been frozen from Hungary over rule-of-law and corruption concerns. After the change of government, Hungary’s parliament passed a transparency and rule-of-law package and the Commission moved to release around €16.4 billion — some €10 billion of recovery funds, €4.2 billion of cohesion money, and a further €2.2 billion as reforms complete. None of that was formally conditioned on gas. But it establishes the exchange rate: a member state that aligns gets its money back, and one that litigates does not.

Orbán loses, and the deadline stays hard

On 12 April 2026 Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz lost the Hungarian election to Péter Magyar’s Tisza party, which took 141 of 199 seats on 53.2 per cent of the list vote. Magyar became prime minister on 9 May. He has committed to ending Hungary’s reliance on Russian energy — and to doing it by 2035, not by the EU’s 2027.

That gap is the most instructive thing to happen to this file all year. A pro-European government, elected on unblocking EU funds, looked at the same pipelines and reached the same conclusion its predecessor had about timing. In 2024 roughly 74 per cent of Hungary’s gas and 48 per cent of its oil came from Russia. Changing who is in office in Budapest did not move a single interconnector. The politics were never the whole constraint.

What Ukraine still charges for

It is widely assumed that when Russian gas stopped crossing Ukraine, Ukraine stopped earning from moving Russian molecules. Neither half of that is quite right.

On gas, the transit is genuinely finished: nothing Russian has crossed since 1 January 2025. But the network did not go quiet. Ukraine’s Ministry of Energy reports about 6.9 bcm moving through the gas transmission system after transit ended — now flowing the other way, as imports into Ukraine and as storage services for European traders using its very large underground capacity. What vanished was the Gazprom cheque: under a billion dollars a year, most of which had gone to running the system rather than to profit. Ukraine’s regulator then did the same thing Slovakia and Austria did, and for the same reason — it raised transmission tariffs, because the fixed cost of a pipeline network does not fall when the gas in it does.

Oil is the part that never stopped, and it is where the money still is. Russian crude continues to move down the southern leg of the Druzhba pipeline, across Ukraine, into refineries in Hungary and Slovakia — and Ukraine’s state operator Ukrtransnafta collects a transit tariff on every tonne. The ten-year contract signed with Transneft in 2019 was worth around $1.5 billion, some $150 million a year. In April 2023 Ukrtransnafta doubled the tariff, from €13.6 to €27.2 a tonne, citing the cost of repairing war damage.

Which produces the strangest arrangement in European energy: a country under Russian invasion earning a fee for delivering Russian oil to the two EU member states that voted against sanctioning it.

That arrangement was tested to destruction this year. On 27 January 2026 a Russian drone strike damaged infrastructure near the Brody hub in western Ukraine and the southern leg stopped. Budapest and Bratislava responded not by seeking alternative crude but by using the leverage they had: they blocked EU approval of a €90 billion loan to Ukraine and the bloc’s 20th sanctions package until the oil flowed again. Slovakia suspended diesel exports to Ukraine and cut emergency electricity supplies. Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the pressure to reopen the pipeline “blackmail”.

On 22 April 2026 Ukrtransnafta restored pressure and pumping resumed, with deliveries reaching Hungarian and Slovak refineries the next day. Within hours, EU ambassadors gave preliminary approval to the €90 billion loan — two annual tranches of €45 billion — and to the sanctions package.

Note the timing. The blockade ran through February and March and broke on 22 April, ten days after Hungary’s election and more than a fortnight before the new government took office. The lever was pulled by an outgoing administration; the pipeline, and the incentive to use it as leverage, outlasted the government that used it. That is the same lesson as 1968, restated in a different currency: the infrastructure sets the terms, and whoever holds a segment of it holds something to trade.

The tariff trap

Here is the mechanism that makes landlocked supply expensive, and it is not the one most coverage reaches for. Gas transmission is priced through entry and exit tariffs at each border. A cargo landed at Rotterdam or Krk and delivered to Bratislava pays a charge on the way out of one system and into the next, at every crossing. Coastal states pay once. Landlocked states pay a stack.

Worse, those tariffs are rising for exactly the reason they should not have to. Transmission charges are set to recover the fixed cost of a network over the volume that flows through it. When transit collapses, the same costs are spread across far less gas.

Read that as a loop rather than a list. Transit stops, so throughput collapses; fixed costs are recovered over less gas, so tariffs rise; higher tariffs make the landlocked route more expensive than the alternatives, so shippers route around it; throughput falls again. Ukrainian traders looking to import have already begun preferring a northern route via Poland or Lithuania over the Austrian and Slovak corridor on cost grounds.

The cruelty of the arithmetic is that it lands hardest on the states with the least room to respond. A country asked to replace Russian pipeline gas with LNG bought at a German or Italian terminal discovers that the same molecule costs it more than it costs the country that unloaded it, and that the gap is widening because its own pipes are emptier.

The replacement supply is stuck at Hormuz

The phase-out was designed on an assumption: that LNG would be available to replace what the pipelines stopped carrying. Through 2025 that held. An earlier piece here found the EU importing a record 146 bcm of LNG in 2025, overtaking China and Japan to become the world’s largest importer, with 58 per cent of it American and LNG supplying 47 per cent of total EU gas. It also flagged the risk that mattered: ACER modelled 2026 as a fork on the Strait of Hormuz, with 47 bcm — about a third of annual EU LNG intake — separating the branch where the strait reopened from the branch where it did not.

It did not reopen. A Qatari-owned LNG tanker, the Al Rekayyat, was struck near the strait on 7 July 2026, halting Qatari shipments for three weeks; a second loaded tanker was hit in early August. Strikes on Ras Laffan have damaged a reported 17 per cent of Qatari liquefaction capacity, and the de facto closure has trapped something like a fifth of daily global LNG flows, with European imports running well below pre-conflict expectations as cargoes are pulled to Asia.

So the two halves of the plan have failed together. Russian pipeline gas is being switched off on a legal deadline, and the seaborne supply meant to replace it is short, dear and contested. For a coastal state that is a bad year. For a landlocked one it is a bad year experienced through somebody else’s terminal, at the end of somebody else’s pipe, behind a tariff that just went up.

Norway is the answer, and Norway is full

If not Russian pipeline gas and not, this year, reliable seaborne LNG, then what? Overwhelmingly the answer is Norway. It is now the European Union’s largest single gas supplier on any measure — 31 per cent of all EU gas imports in 2025, pipeline and LNG combined, up from 24 per cent in 2021, and 54.4 per cent of gas arriving in gaseous state. Where Russia used to sit in the EU’s import mix, Norway now sits.

And it is running flat out. Gassco moved 114.9 bcm through the pipeline network in 2025, just below the 2024 record of 117.6 bcm, with 2026 expected in a 110 to 120 bcm band. Production tells the same story: 123.1 bcm forecast for 2026 against 119.8 bcm in 2025 and a 2024 record of 124.2 bcm. These are not the numbers of a supplier with headroom. They are the numbers of a plateau.

The Norwegian Offshore Directorate is explicit about what comes next. The plateau holds to about 2027; output declines after 2030, with total oil and gas falling from roughly 4.1 million barrels of oil equivalent a day in 2026 to about 3.5 million by 2030. Norwegian gas stays high for three or four more years and then does not.

What Norway has been doing instead of growing is locking in. After a decade in which European utilities preferred the spot market, long-term contracts have come back, and Equinor has signed a run of them.

The middle row is the one that matters for this piece. Pražská plynárenská is the city of Prague’s gas and electricity company, and Equinor has contracted to supply it for a decade — a Norwegian producer selling directly into a landlocked member state. Equinor’s own framing makes the strategy plain: its markets were north-west Europe and the UK, it expanded to the Baltics and Poland over the last decade, and it now sees “a growing market potential among customers in Central and Southern Europe”. That is a supplier walking deliberately into the belt this article is about.

One clause in that deal does more work than the headline. Equinor delivers at the Czech hub — not at a Norwegian beach terminal, not at a German border point, but inside Czechia. Which means the seller, not the buyer, carries the transit and the entry-exit tariffs across every intervening system. That is precisely the escape route from the tariff stack described earlier: a landlocked buyer cannot avoid the crossings, but it can buy from someone who has agreed to absorb them.

Two caveats keep this from being the happy ending. Volumes, terms and pricing in the Czech contract are confidential, so nobody outside the parties can say what share of Czech demand it covers or what the delivered-at-hub convenience costs; the tariffs are absorbed, not abolished. And the larger constraint is arithmetic. A supplier at plateau, facing decline after 2030, can sign as many long-term contracts as it likes — it cannot sign more gas than it produces. Every decade-long deal Equinor writes into central Europe allocates a fixed pie more firmly, which is excellent for the buyer who signs and no help at all to the one who does not.

The coast has been busy: Europe’s regas build-out

The obvious answer to a pipeline problem is a ship, and Europe has spent four years acting on exactly that. Since 2022 the continent has added roughly twelve new import terminals and six expansions, some 70 bcm a year of new capacity, taking Europe’s regasification capacity to about 250 bcm. On the EU-only measure, import capacity rose 76 bcm between 2021 and 2025, to 242 bcm a year. Six more terminals or expansions are expected during 2026.

Note where those sit. Ravenna and the Adriatic terminal feed the Italian grid, which is one of the two systems Austria imports through; Krk is the terminal that was built explicitly to give central Europe a non-Russian option; Wilhelmshaven feeds the German network the other three depend on. The coastal infrastructure the landlocked states need has, on the whole, been built.

And it is half empty. EU regasification terminals ran at an average utilisation of about 52 per cent, with Finland and Greece below 20 per cent. The Alexandroupolis FSRU in Greece, commissioned in late 2024 and intended precisely to push gas north into the Balkans and central Europe, was suspended in January 2025 over a technical fault and managed 4 per cent utilisation across the year.

That is the sharpest fact in this piece, and it should be read carefully. Europe’s constraint is not a shortage of places to land LNG. There is spare regasification capacity sitting on the coast today. What there is not, for a shipper trying to move that gas to Bratislava or Budapest, is a cheap way inland — which returns to the tariff stack described above. Building a twelfth terminal does nothing about the cost of the eighth border crossing. The bottleneck has moved from the sea to the pipes, and European energy policy has been slower to notice than the balance sheets of the transmission operators have.

Where the gas itself is coming from

On the supply side the picture is one of abundance arriving slightly too late. The International Gas Union’s 2026 report puts global LNG trade at a record 436.98 million tonnes in 2025, up 6.3 per cent, with global liquefaction capacity rising 30 mtpa to 524.5 mtpa. Europe was the demand story: imports jumped 26.1 Mt to 126.2 Mt as the region absorbed the end of Russian transit through Ukraine.

The United States became the world’s largest LNG exporter for the first time, at 110.7 Mt, adding 22.3 Mt in a single year and passing Qatar (81.5 Mt) and Australia (80.3 Mt). Russia held fourth place at 30.5 Mt, constrained by sanctions. Two genuinely new exporters appeared — Canada, through LNG Canada, and the Mauritania–Senegal Tortue project — the first additions to the export club since 2022.

The forward book is more American still. 68.4 mtpa reached final investment decision in 2025, the strongest year since 2019 and the close of a five-year cycle that approved 206 mtpa. Of the 234.3 mtpa now under construction or approved, about 47.8 per cent is in the United States and a further 20 per cent in Qatar.

Two caveats turn that abundance into cold comfort for the winter in question. The first is timing: liquefaction takes four to six years from investment decision to first cargo, so the class of 2025 lands around 2029 to 2031. It does nothing for 2026, 2027 or 2028 — the exact window in which the EU’s Russian gas ban takes effect. The second is concentration. An earlier piece here found 58 per cent of EU LNG already arriving from the United States and observed that removing a supplier from a concentrated portfolio makes it more concentrated. Nearly half the capacity now being built is American, so the portfolio Europe will hold in the 2030s is more American than the one it holds today, not less.

And the near-term supply shock is on the other side of that concentration. IGU records the closure of the Strait of Hormuz cutting off virtually all Qatari and Emirati LNG — together around 16 per cent of global liquefaction capacity — and Iranian missile strikes on two trains at Ras Laffan on 18 March 2026 removing 12.8 mtpa, about 17 per cent of Qatar’s nameplate capacity, for an expected three to five years. QatarEnergy declared force majeure. The Asian spot benchmark rose almost 70 per cent to a peak of $25.39/MMBtu on 3 March, and shipping rates east of Suez went from about $14,250 a day in February to $300,000 on 5 March before settling near $100,000. At least eight Atlantic cargoes were pulled away from Europe to cover Asian demand.

So the ships exist, the terminals exist, and the export capacity is being built at record pace. What is missing in the winter of 2026 is molecules now, at a price a Slovak or Hungarian industrial buyer can pay after the tariffs are added.

Small countries, large share of Europe’s actual work

It would be easy to read 8.3 per cent of gas demand as 8.3 per cent of the problem. That misreads what these economies do. The landlocked five hold about 35.7 million people, 7.9 per cent of the EU’s population — so their gas use is roughly proportionate to their size. Their share of Europe’s industrial employment is not.

Czechia is the most manufacturing-intensive economy in the European Union, with almost a quarter of everyone in work employed in industry — well ahead of Germany. Slovakia and Hungary follow. And they do it at close to full employment: Czechia’s 2.6 per cent unemployment is the lowest rate in the bloc, and three of the four central states sit at or below the EU average of 6.0. There is very little idle labour in these countries. What there is, is already working, and disproportionately working in factories.

Those factories are the energy-exposed kind. Automotive manufacturing accounts for a larger share of national employment in Slovakia, Czechia and Hungary than in any other EU member state including Germany, and it is heavily export-facing — on one estimate 18 per cent of Slovak and 12 per cent of Czech automotive employment depends on foreign final demand. A gas-cost penalty in these four countries is therefore not a consumer-bills story. It lands on the part of the European economy that actually makes things, in the places that make the most of them per head, and it lands on employment that has nowhere slack to absorb it.

That is the development argument these governments make, and on the numbers it is not a weak one. A country whose industrial base is a quarter of its workforce, whose input costs are set by tariffs on other people’s pipes, and whose convergence with western European incomes was built on being the cheap, competent factory of the single market, has a real interest in the price of gas that is different in kind from a service economy on a coast.

The membership ledger

Set against that, EU membership is not incidental to these economies — it is the reason the factories are there. The balance is worth stating on both sides rather than assumed either way.

The honest reading is that the left column is worth more than the right column costs, and that the four governments concerned mostly know it — which is why the fight has been over timing and compensation rather than over membership. Hungary’s new government asked for 2035 instead of 2027 and moved quickly to unlock its frozen funds. Slovakia is suing over the legal base, not leaving. Czechia and Austria took the exit and are through it.

The unresolved question is narrower and more awkward than the rhetoric on either side. The Union has decided, by majority, that these five will stop buying the gas their grids were built to carry. It has not yet answered who pays for the tariff stack, the emptier pipes and the higher industrial input costs in the interval — and the interval now runs through a winter in which the replacement supply is being fought over in the Persian Gulf.

Winter is coming

The storage numbers are the part that should worry a policymaker. EU gas storage stood at about 60 per cent in mid-August 2026 — the lowest seasonal level in records going back to 2009, and roughly 15 bcm below the five-year average. The binding fill target for 1 November was cut from 90 per cent to 80, which is less a policy choice than an acknowledgement. TTF has traded above €65/MWh, the highest since January 2023.

The country the landlocked four would import through is in no better shape. Germany’s forty-odd storage facilities stood at 50.14 per cent in mid-August, on Gas Infrastructure Europe’s count — about a quarter below the same date last year and more than 45 percentage points below 2023 and 2024. Germany, unlike states that buy strategically, leaves filling to private traders, and those traders are declining to buy at €65 while betting the price falls if the Iran war ends. The Economy Ministry has resorted to publicly urging them to fill; one opposition MP called the strategy a gamble. The transmission operators’ association FNB Gas judged on 19 August that Germany’s own 71 per cent target for 1 November is now “virtually unattainable”, warning that low LNG imports, a late or prolonged cold spell or an infrastructure failure could jeopardise supply.

Austria, Czechia, Hungary and Slovakia all hold large storage capacity relative to their own winter demand — a legacy of the transit role — and hold derogated targets as a result. That capacity is the single genuine advantage of their position. But capacity is not gas: Slovakia is among the European countries currently under 50 per cent full, alongside Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Latvia, while Spain, Italy, Denmark and Poland sit among the most comfortable. Big tanks help only to the extent something has been put in them. The advantage buys a season, at best. It does not buy a supply route, and this year it is not even reliably buying the season.

Nothing here forecasts a shortage. Europe has repeatedly been more resilient than the pessimistic reading allowed, and demand has fallen faster than most models assumed. But the margin has thinned on every axis at once, and the states with the least optionality are the ones sitting furthest from the sea.

What this piece could not establish

Consumption figures are Eurostat 2024 balances rather than 2025, deliberately: the 2025 annual series is still incomplete, returning implausible values for several members including Hungary and Slovakia, and using it would have produced a nonsense table. The conversion from terajoules to billion cubic metres uses 38.3 TJ gross calorific value per million cubic metres, a convention rather than a measurement; the ranking is unaffected but the absolute numbers shift by a few per cent under other conventions.

Transit volumes by member state are not published on a consistent public basis, so this piece describes the direction and consequence of the collapse in Slovak and Austrian throughput rather than tabulating it. The tariff figures are drawn from regulatory and trade reporting on individual national methodologies, several of which were proposals under consultation rather than final approved tariffs at the time of writing — the Austrian interconnection-point increases in particular. No single comparable public table of EU cross-border gas tariffs exists, which is itself part of why tariff stacking is under-discussed.

Finally, the Hormuz situation is live and the figures attached to it — capacity damaged, share of global flows trapped, the shortfall in European imports — come from reporting during an ongoing conflict and should be treated as estimates that will be revised.