We have come to know the Kremlin's energy playbook well: "Europe will freeze without Russian gas," "sanctions hurt Europe more than Russia," "a managed, indefinite return to Russian supply is simply pragmatic." The respected European project EUvsDisinfo has repeatedly exposed these false narratives, carried by Russian state media, proxy outlets, and paid commentators. But Kremlin-friendly energy narratives do not travel only through obvious propaganda channels. They also enter policy debate through expert commentary, think tanks, media quotes, and institutional platforms, where they are far harder to see.

None of the apocalyptic forecasts came true. Europe cut Russian gas imports from 45% in 2021 to 13% by 2025 without blackouts or economic collapse. Yet the narratives predicting ruin kept circulating, sometimes from unexpected addresses. One of them, in my view, is worth a closer look: the work of Katja Yafimava, of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

Across nearly two decades, in my reading, her analysis has landed with remarkable consistency where Gazprom would want it. Gazprom's trading arm was once among the sponsors of her program. The record is public, and it is worth reading in full.

The narrative you don't notice

The most effective version of Kremlin-friendly energy messaging does not shout. It hedges, reframes, and omits. It raises "legitimate concerns" about sanctions costs, stresses the "legal complexities" of an LNG ban, and warns of "supply disruption risks" from moving too fast, without weighing Ukrainian lives or the cheaper, homegrown clean-energy alternative. Real concerns about European energy security did exist. What is worth noting is how reliably certain voices amplified concerns and how rarely they weighed counter-evidence.

This is not abstract. Surging oil and gas prices since the Iran war have handed Russia windfall revenues averaging, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, €604 million a day, money that funds the missiles falling on Ukrainian cities. Every argument for delay has a price, and Ukrainians pay part of it.

The Oxford label, and the money behind it

Katja Yafimava is a Senior Research Fellow at the OIES, which she joined in 2006. The institute is an independent charity rather than a department of the University of Oxford, which recognizes it as a separate independent research center. It carries the Oxford name, and its researchers appear regularly as authoritative, independent voices in UK and European media.

That independence has been questioned. Democracy for Sale, an investigative outlet, has documented the proximity between Russian oil and gas industry money and OIES, which previously received funding from Gazprom and its subsidiaries. OIES's own website and annual reports up to 2020 list Gazprom Marketing and Trading among over 20 organizations that sponsored equally its Natural Gas Research Programme, where Yafimava works, alongside Nord Stream 2 financiers Shell, OMV, Uniper, and Wintershall.

None of that, on its own, tells you what any individual researcher believes. What makes it worth raising is the alignment between that funding context and a published record that, across nearly two decades, has been remarkably convenient for Gazprom's positions.

Remarkable consistency

Consider the pattern. In 2017, Yafimava argued that Poland's legal challenge to the European Commission decision widening Gazprom's access to the OPAL pipeline risked letting political objectives override regulatory rules, a framing that would sit comfortably in Gazprom's own filings. She framed the EU's Gas Directive amendment as an instrument "aimed primarily at Nord Stream 2" in a 2019 paper. Russian state media have quoted her approvingly in pieces casting Brussels or Washington as acting in bad faith.

In September 2021, as suspicion grew that Gazprom was deliberately holding back gas to squeeze Europe before winter, she told Bloomberg she did not subscribe to that view, insisting the company "has not abused" the tight market and "has not manipulated it," and had "honored all of its contractual supply obligations to Europe." Within months, Russia's supply cuts had become the opening move of an energy war. In January 2022, the head of the IEA said Russia's cuts were creating "artificial tightness" in European markets.

Each judgment is defensible in isolation. It is the direction of the whole series that is striking: over years and across cases, the analysis lands where Gazprom would want it to land.

The pattern holds as the war grinds on

Through 2022 and 2023, Yafimava warned that cutting Russian gas too fast risked "unavoidable" blackouts in Central and Eastern Europe. The blackouts never came. In a 2025 paper, she and two OIES colleagues accepted that the phase-out would be manageable for markets, but argued that the EU's proposed ban risked undermining the commercial and legal positions of European importers, and that it was "not obvious" the risk was worth taking to end modest volumes of Russian gas after 2027. A competing Forum Energii report concluded that full EU independence from Russian fuel by 2027 is feasible, and that Russia needs EU markets more than the EU needs Russian supply. In early 2026, she wrote that no complete phase-out "will happen either by 2027 or by 2028."

A forecast is not a crime. But the forecasts, like the analyses, keep pointing one way.

She has also stepped beyond technical commentary. On 27 January 2026, responding to a Financial Times report on US security guarantees for Ukraine, she posted on X that "reliable security guarantees could only be achieved via common European security architecture that would have to include Russia," a framing that mirrors a longstanding Kremlin strategic goal.

Katja Yafimava's current position as Vice-Chair of the UNECE Group of Experts on Gas gives her a visible role in a UN forum that helps shape discussion on European gas policy, security of supply, and the energy transition. In January 2026 she co-opened and concluded the Group's workshop on implementation of the EU Methane Regulation. The arguments she repeatedly advances can have policy effects closely aligned with Russian commercial and strategic interests. At a UNECE/OIES workshop in 2025, for example, she explicitly examined the possibility of a "limited return" of Russian gas to Europe via Ukraine, while her subsequent OIES paper argued that the EU ban on Russian gas could undermine European importers and security of supply and questioned whether ending the remaining Russian imports after 2027 was worth the associated risks.

The alignment is a matter of record. Why independent analysis, over nearly twenty years, has tracked so reliably the interests of a company that once helped fund her program is a question that deserves an answer.

Here is what the arguments for delay leave out: the alternative to Russian energy is not economic ruin. It is cheaper renewable power. The International Renewable Energy Agency found that in 2024, 91% of new renewable projects were cheaper than any fossil-fuel alternative; solar came in 41% below fossil power, and onshore wind 53% below. Renewables saved $467 billion in fossil-fuel costs in 2024 alone, and battery storage has fallen more than 93% in price since 2010.

This is the point that "supply disruption" warnings tend to bury, and it is why the warnings matter. Every year of delay, justified by the risks of moving too fast, is a year of continued payments to Moscow when a cheaper, domestic, un-weaponizable alternative already exists. Renewables reached 47% of the EU electricity mix in 2025; EU gas demand fell more than 17% between 2022 and early 2025; and the gas import ban agreed in December 2025 phases out Russian pipeline gas and LNG by the end of 2027, precisely the direction the delay arguments have worked against. The transition is not the risk. The delay is.

What should change

Editors, producers, and conference organizers could apply to energy analysts the conflict-of-interest standards already routine for pharmaceutical research: prior employment or program funding from Gazprom, Sberbank, or Russia-linked entities disclosed clearly every time such an analyst is presented as independent. UNECE could ask whether agenda-setting roles over European energy policy are well placed with analysts whose published record aligns so consistently with Kremlin positions. And Europe could close the transparency gaps that let think tanks with Russian-adjacent funding operate without disclosure requirements.

Every euro Russia earns from energy funds the war against Ukraine. The least we can do is know who is arguing for delay, and who once funded the programs they work in.

Disclosure: the author was involved in a March 2026 Razom We Stand research concerning the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies and Katja Yafimava, and works as a strategic advisor to the organization. Euromaidan Press reached out to Dr. Yafimava for a comment, but received no answer at publication date.

Oleh Savytskyi

Oleh Savytskyi is a world-class climate and energy policy expert. Oleh has ten years of experience in the field – from youth climate activism to consulting the Ministry of Environment of Ukraine to managing international advocacy campaigns at Razom We Stand. Oleh is a fellow of the Michael Succow Nature Conservation Fund and an alumnus of the Agora Energiewende EnerTracks training program for energy transition professionals.

Editor's note. The opinions expressed in our Opinion section belong to their authors. Euromaidan Press' editorial team may or may not share them.

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