Ukraine's power play: Russia's gas has nowhere to go
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We all want to enjoy food that tastes great and is sourced responsibly. But it's not always easy to know where your favourite foods come from. McDonald's works with more than 23,000 British and Irish farmers to source quality ingredients. Mike Allwood is a dairy farmer from Cheshire who supplies organic milk to McDonald's in the UK for its teas, coffees and porridge through Arla.

We're involved in a network which has been set up by Arla to look at the possibilities for farming regeneratively. One of the things we're doing here is moving our cattle and giving them a fresh piece of grass every day to help regenerate the soil. We're very lucky that we've had a long-term relationship with McDonald's and I think often people don't realise how seriously McDonald's take their relationships with farmers.

Change a little, change a lot. Find out more about McDonald's plan for change on the McDonald's website. Welcome to the World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. Today with me, Alex Dibble and Toby Gillis. As 2025 began, a deal for Russian gas to be pumped through Ukraine to the rest of Europe

But the move brings potential political ramifications for Ukraine, given some of its neighbours face inevitable price hikes.

Despite most of Europe weaning itself off Russian gas since the start of the invasion, some countries still rely on it. Joining us now is The Times' correspondent Oliver Moody, who has a particular focus on Eastern Europe and is covering this story. Oliver, in your latest piece, you talk about the damage to Putin's allies, Slovakia and Hungary, and to Moldova, whose recently re-elected president is west-leaning. What does this mean for each?

What we're really talking about here is 15 billion cubic metres of natural gas. There may be listeners for whom that number is a bit meaningless. So to put it into context, the European Union as a whole consumes about 350 billion cubic metres of gas a year. So these flows in over Ukraine were equivalent to about 4% of their annual consumption. So in the grand scheme of things, it's not that big a deal.

It has been a very big deal, however, for some of the countries in Central Europe, kind of immediate recipients of that gas. The really obvious ones are Hungary, Austria and Slovakia in particular.

Hungary has made arrangements to get the bulk of its Russian gas shipped through other routes, so it's not going to suffer too badly. Austria, again, can get gas rerouted quite straightforwardly. It's probably most problematic for Slovakia, which really was very heavily reliant on that pipeline route through Ukraine and actually threatened to cut off its electricity exports there.

to Ukraine in revenge. And then you have Moldova, which is a bit of a special case. Most of Moldova has weaned itself off dependence on Russian gas.

altogether and gets its supplies from other parts of Europe. However, for the sort of semi-separate Moldovan region of Transnistria, which is almost under Russian military occupation, they do get a lot of gas through that transit route. And Gazprom, the Russian state energy conglomerate, had already cut off the gas to Transnistria.

at the same time on January 1st. So it looks as though there is some sort of extra geopolitical complication in that case. And can the EU also help Moldova? And what about Transnistria? Would it even want to help an area effectively under Russian control?

The Russian gas has been going almost exclusively to Transnistria rather than to the rest of the country. Already since New Year's Day, the gas is basically gone, which is already causing some unrest locally. You know, there have been suggestions from Russian sources that they might be trying to stir something up.

in Transnistria. It is also problematic for Moldova more widely, however, because that gas was powering the electricity plant, which is now switched over to coal, but the coal reserves are limited. They could potentially run out in the next month or two, and then that could mean quite difficult operations

Issues sourcing electricity for the rest of Moldova, which is already in a pretty precarious situation after a couple of very, very finely balanced election results with a huge amount of Russian interference. Last year, late last year, there was a very, very close run presidential election in which Maya Sandu, the very kind of epically pro-Western

incumbent won by an extremely narrow margin after very, very large amounts of money were invested by Russia and by its Moldovan

including various kind of pro-Russian opposition activists in exile in Moscow. And Sandu is now back in place as president, but is facing, as well as a very kind of unstable situation across the river in Transnistria, parliamentary elections. And again, Russia seems to be very...

clearly persisting in its attempts to destabilise the political situation in this state, which has swung a long way towards the West since the outbreak of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Oliver, how damaging exactly is this to Vladimir Putin, both in financial terms, but also given the impacts you've spoken about on Slovakia and Hungary, in terms of his relationship with his European allies? In Hungary's case...

Gazprom has said it is going to honour its gas contracts. It'll just have to do so via other routes. So it's not a question of Hungary running out of gas. It's more a question of what exactly it has to pay for that gas.

But Slovakia's case is a bit different. It was not so well prepared for this eventuality. But Russia has said that it's going to ensure Slovakia to get the gas that it's due, according to the contracts. Again, it might be a bit more expensive there.

So you will probably start to see some bill increases, which could cause a bit of political discomfort, particularly for Robert Fidso, the populist prime minister of Slovakia. One final thing that is worth mentioning is that although the end of the Ukrainian campaign

transit route is probably not going to make a vast amount of difference to Russia's fiscal position, because we're not talking about a very large amount of gas at the end of the day. It does underline the extent to which Putin's energy leverage over Europe has been radically diminished since February 2022.

He's only really left with the kind of southern gas routes through Turkey. And that in turn is reflective of the very deep hole that Gazprom has fallen into, where it is really struggling to exported surplus gas.

China is dragging its heels on negotiating a second pipeline through Siberia that might provide a kind of alternative destination. But we are we're looking at a situation where Russia's gas revenues are really in a kind of long term terminal situation.

which in turn, from the perspective of the economic war, puts the emphasis even more on oil, a lot of which is coming out through Russia's Baltic ports. And now since Finland has landed special forces on an oil tanker suspected of damaging oil,

off-water infrastructure in the Gulf of Finland, and since the northern European countries in the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force have agreed to start challenging those Shadow Fleet tankers for their insurance policies, that looks like the kind of next obvious Western stranglehold on Russia's fossil fuel revenues.

So that's a possible long-term Western tactic. But what about the short-term pain? Can the UK, maybe even the US, expect any ramifications, do you think, from Ukraine's choice?

This was an extremely foreseeable series of events. Ukraine had left very little doubt in people's minds that it was not going to renew. The transit deal with Russia when it expired at the end of 2024 and the European Union has had a lot of time to prepare for the end of the Ukraine transit route.

The European gas market as a whole is nothing like as tight and desperate as it was in 2022 when the full-scale invasion started. There's more spare capacity in the global LNG markets, so not being a kind of gas market

I'm very wary of making grand predictions, but I think it would come as a dramatic surprise if we were to see anything like the kind of increase in prices that happened in 2022. And then a kind of interesting subplot here is what this does to the EU's approach towards the incoming crisis.

Trump administration from January the 20th. Some member states, particularly Germany, had already been talking about trying to bundle together European LNG imports from the US as a kind of sweetener to try and avert tariffs from the Trump presidency. And obviously, if there's a greater need for LNG imports,

from America that could increase the strength of that case. One to watch for sure. Oliver Moody, The Times Berlin correspondent. Thank you very much indeed. And thank you for spending 10 minutes to stay on top of the world with the help of The Times. We'll see you tomorrow.

We all want to enjoy food that tastes great and is sourced responsibly. But it's not always easy to know where your favourite foods come from. McDonald's works with more than 23,000 British and Irish farmers to source quality ingredients.

Sophie Bambridge grows quality potatoes for McDonald's Iconic Fries in Norfolk. I think McDonald's are one of the biggest supporters of British farming. They have a real commitment to British potatoes. The Sustainable Fries Fund is a collaborative investment by McCain and McDonald's.

to help us understand and try different growing techniques for potatoes so that we can understand what we can do to help reduce our impact on the environment but still produce a good quality potato. It helps enable us to try things without having the risk and cost of potentially it going wrong. The support from McCain and McDonald's is really useful to us. Change a little, change a lot. Find out more about McDonald's Plan for Change on the McDonald's website.