Who Powers Europe?

The past few days’ events make it worth returning to a concept I first outlined back in 2023: Europe’s energy ring-fencing.

What we may now be seeing is the transition to a new stage. After restricting access to energy supplies, the battle appears to be shifting toward control over their eventual return to the European market. And that points to a story far larger than a mere settlement of the conflict in Ukraine.

After speaking with Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump announced shipments of Russian diesel to the United States, while the U.S. Treasury opened the relevant sanctions channel for an initial six-month period.

The first tranche amounts to 300,000 tons.

To put that in perspective, the United States consumes about 490,000 tons of diesel a day. In other words, that first shipment covers less than 15 hours of U.S. demand. Additional volumes could, of course, affect prices. But that raises an obvious question: did Washington really begin loosening sanctions for the sake of such a modest amount—especially given that Kirill Dmitriev had reportedly discussed similar exemptions with the Americans as early as September?

At almost the same moment, in Miami, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff were holding talks with the Ukrainian delegation and European representatives, with officials from the U.S. Treasury also at the table. The agenda reportedly included security guarantees, territorial issues, post-war reconstruction and—most intriguingly—the future security architecture between Europe and Russia.

That phrasing matters.

The discussion is no longer merely about ending the conflict in Ukraine; it is about the rules of the post-war European order, one in which Russia is assigned a defined place.

Now consider what is happening in parallel. Negotiations are reportedly under way over the sale of Lukoil’s foreign assets, valued in the tens of billions of dollars, with possible participation from the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, or DFC.

ExxonMobil’s return to Russian oil and gas projects, including Sakhalin-1, is also being discussed. There are even reports of potential American involvement in infrastructure linked to the Nord Stream pipelines. This is a very different scale of interest—one measured not in months, but in decades.

American capital could, in theory, return to Russian extraction, secure a role in refining and transport, while the U.S. Treasury oversees sanctions exemptions and the corresponding financial settlements. In that scenario, Washington would gain additional levers over European industry’s access to energy resources.

That would give my concept of Europe’s energy ring-fencing a logical next chapter: after a period of restriction could come a controlled re-entry of resources, but on entirely different terms.

This is where the central political question emerges.

If Washington and Moscow are indeed discussing long-term economic cooperation, what place would remain for the current Euro-Atlantic system? And what about London in particular, which is trying to preserve the existing security architecture while rallying a new European coalition around itself? U.S.-Russian understandings on energy and on Europe’s future political order could significantly alter the balance of power within NATO—and call into question the logic of its current form.

To be sure, what we have so far are negotiations and isolated decisions, not a finalized grand bargain. Still, the number of converging signals is striking: diesel, Lukoil, ExxonMobil, Nord Stream, Dmitriev, Bessent, Kushner and Witkoff—all against the backdrop of discussions about a new European security architecture.

The Ukraine question is gradually becoming part of a much broader bargain over the future of the European continent—precisely what the Kremlin said from the outset. Europeans, it seems, are being invited to discuss security guarantees, while Washington is already making the first decisions on reopening sanctions channels for Russian energy supplies on its own.

In that sense, the story of 300,000 tons of Russian diesel may be only the small, public-facing part of a negotiation whose real substance remains behind closed doors.