After the Pipeline? Visible Ruptures and Hidden Continuities in Russia–Ukraine–EU Energy Chains

The energy map of Russia, Ukraine, and the European Union changed dramatically after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Pipelines were disrupted, trade routes redirected, and long-standing commercial relationships fractured. Looking beyond the most visible disruption of pipelines, trade routes, and energy flows reveals a complex landscape of changing supply chains, industrial products, and commercial relationships. Drawing on long-term research on the region’s energy political economy, Margarita M. Balmaceda explores how war, sanctions, decarbonization, and shifting markets have reshaped Russia–Ukraine–EU energy ties—and why some of the most consequential fossil-fuel connections are often the hardest to see.

Margarita M. Balmaceda is a political scientist working at the intersection of international relations, energy political economy, and technology. She is Professor of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University and an Associate of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She is the author of, among other works, Russian Energy Chains: The Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union (Columbia University Press, 2021), which received the Marshall D. Shulman Book Prize and the Ed A. Hewett Book Prize. She holds a PhD in Politics from Princeton University and recently received an Expert Certification on Sustainable Fertilizers, as well as Leader Certifications on Product Stewardship and Nutrient Stewardship from the International Fertilizer Association. Her ongoing book project, The Last Frontier of Decarbonization: Hidden Industrial Carbon between Geopolitics and Climate Change (under contract at Columbia University Press), focuses on nitrogen fertilizers, steel, and hydrogen as cases for examining the interface between climate change and geopolitical issues. Among other distinctions, she has been a Fulbright Scholar, an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, and a Petro Jacyk Distinguished Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, and has held fellowships at the Alfried Krupp Institute for Advanced Study and the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, where from 2018 to 2023 she led the international Study Group “Energy Materiality: Infrastructure, Spatiality and Power.” Most recently, as a 2024–2025 Wilson Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, she worked on the and China-related aspects of her book project. Using her Ukrainian, Russian, Hungarian, and German language skills, she has conducted extensive research in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, Hungary, and Germany, studying energy and resource politics and relationships from “inside” and examining the goals and interests of local stakeholders.