Ten Years Without Buying Russian Gas: Where Does Ukraine’s Gas Come From Now?

Ukraine is a country that extracts natural gas from beneath its own soil. The state energy group Naftogaz (Naftogaz of Ukraine) explains that extraction by its own group accounts for more than 70% of Ukraine’s gas production. What extraction does not cover is bought from abroad and stored in underground storage facilities to prepare for winter.

Russia is not among those suppliers. Naftogaz stopped buying from Russia in November 2015, more than ten years ago now. At the same time, the contract carrying Russian gas through Ukraine to Europe continued until January 1, 2025. Buying and transporting have proceeded as two separate stories.

Purchases Stopped on November 25, 2015

In an announcement of March 31, 2016, Naftogaz wrote that, “on November 25, 2015, in response to falling gas prices on the European market, [we] stopped purchasing gas from the Russian supplier.” The same announcement said that the price Gazprom offered for the April-June 2016 quarter was higher than what European suppliers were offering, and Naftogaz decided not to resume purchases from April 1 either.

The announcement said that, as of March 31, 2016, 125 days had passed without imports from Russia, marking the first time the three winter months had been crossed without any Russian imports. Over that period, Russian gas continued to be transported to Europe, with about 27 billion cubic meters carried, the announcement said. Naftogaz also said at the time that it remained open to negotiations to bring the terms in line with the market.

In other words, Naftogaz stopped buying gas directly from Russia more than six years before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The reason given at the time was price.

Domestic Extraction and Underground Storage

According to a Naftogaz announcement of April 21, 2025, the group’s extraction in 2024 was 14.6 billion cubic meters, the highest since 2017. That year, its extraction subsidiary Ukrgasvydobuvannya brought 83 new wells online.

On storage, Naftogaz’s company profile page describes Ukraine’s underground gas storage facilities as having a total capacity of 30.95 billion cubic meters, the largest in Europe. How much can be stored ahead of the heating winter is a matter of concern every year.

Attacks Have Cut Extraction and Pushed Up Imports

Since the full-scale invasion, extraction and storage facilities have been a target of Russian attacks. According to a Naftogaz announcement of February 17, 2026, its group’s facilities have been attacked 401 times since the start of the full-scale invasion, with 229 of those attacks concentrated in 2025 alone — more, it said, than the total for the three preceding years combined. The hardest month was October 2025, with 25 combined attacks in a single month, the company said.

Attacks have continued into 2026 as well; Naftogaz said on August 7, 2026, that attacks since the start of the year had reached 287, already surpassing the total for all of 2025. These figures are as announced by Naftogaz itself, not counted by an independent body.

A fall in extraction means having to buy more from abroad to make up the shortfall. The April 21, 2025, announcement said that the attacks of February 2025 caused the greatest damage, and that Naftogaz had to urgently import 800 million cubic meters of gas to get through the winter. The same announcement said that its contracted volume from the start of 2025 was 1.5 billion cubic meters, of which 300 million cubic meters was liquefied natural gas (LNG) bought from Poland’s ORLEN. It said it had obtained about 430 million euros from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the Norwegian government to fund these imports.

Attacks on power plants and the transmission grid, and distributed power generation, are covered in In a Country Where Power Plants Keep Being Targeted, Generating Electricity in Small Pieces.

The Transit Contract That Expired on January 1, 2025

Even after Naftogaz stopped buying, Ukraine’s pipelines kept carrying Russian gas to Europe. In an announcement of March 13, 2026, Naftogaz explains that, under a 2019 contract, it was obligated to transit gas through Ukraine on Gazprom’s behalf until that contract expired on January 1, 2025.

The same announcement says that in May 2022, military action by Russian occupation forces made it impossible to receive gas at the Sokhranivka entry point. Naftogaz continued transit using the Sudzha entry point, but Gazprom did not pay the transit fees in full. In September 2022, Naftogaz initiated arbitration in Switzerland under the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) rules, as provided for in the contract.

On June 16, 2025, the arbitral tribunal ordered Gazprom to pay over $1.4 billion in unpaid transit fees and interest. Gazprom sought to have this set aside in Switzerland, but according to Naftogaz, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court fully rejected that petition in March 2026.

Not Buying, Not Transporting — What’s Left Afterward

With the 2015 purchase stoppage and the expiration of the 2025 transit contract, the two remaining transactional threads between Ukraine’s gas sector and Russia have both come to an end. What remains now is how much of its domestic extraction Ukraine can protect, and with how much financing it can buy the shortfall from Europe. In its August 2026 announcement, Naftogaz said that attacks on extraction facilities and rising imports had greatly increased the need for international financial support, and that it was prioritizing funding in the form of grants.