Putin Orders Review of Immediate Gas Cutoff to EU as Hormuz Crisis Spikes Prices

The threat echoes the 1973 Arab oil embargo and Russia’s own 2006 & 2009 Ukraine transit cut-offs, when exporters exploited geopolitical shocks to reshape markets. Strategically, it crowns Moscow’s decade-long “pivot to Asia,” begun after EU sanctions in 2014, and accelerates Europe’s century-long march from coal to diversified low-carbon energy. If enacted, the move would hasten the fragmentation of the once-integrated Eurasian gas grid, pushing Russia toward Arctic-to-Asia LNG routes and forcing Europe to overpay for marginal molecules—an echo of past supply crises but within a climate-constrained world likely to need ever less fossil gas by 2070. In that 100-year frame, the episode may be remembered less for short-run price pain than as the moment the post-Cold-War East-West hydrocarbon umbilical was finally severed.