Europe has vowed to abandon energy from Russia and seeks to replace natural gas supplied from the country with liquefied natural gas (LNG).  There's just one problem - Moscow is also a major LNG exporter, which means the EU could end up replacing pipeline Russian gas with imported Russian LNG - just what it had hoped to avoid, BI reported.

Exports of Russian LNG, a supercooled version of natural gas that can be transported by ship, rose 1.1 percent year on year to 4.3 billion cubic meters in October, the highest level since March. France, China and Japan were the biggest importing countries, according to Bloomberg.

Some of the shipments likely hit other EU countries as European demand for natural gas rises sharply as the block heads into winter.

In the first nine months of 2022, LNG shipments from Russia to the EU rose 46 percent from a year earlier to about 16.5 billion cubic meters, Politico reported, citing data from the European Commission.

This came after Russia slowed gas deliveries to the EU through the key Nord Stream 1 pipeline

Imported LNG is only a fraction of the EU's pipeline gas imports. According to Politico, the EU imported 54.2 billion cubic meters of Russian pipeline gas in the first nine months of 2022 and 105.7 billion cubic meters in the same period in 2021.

But the fact that the EU is buying up Russian LNG still makes it vulnerable to the potential political consequences of the Russia-Ukraine war.