REPowerEU was launched in May 2022 with two promises: stop buying Russian energy and build enough of the alternative that Europe would never need it again. Four years on, the EU's own auditors say the first happened largely for reasons outside the plan and the second has barely started.
"Four years after its launch, REPowerEU has stalled, even though several hundred billion euros have been made available," said Mihails Kozlovs, the member of the European Court of Auditors responsible for the report. The Court acknowledges that the EU "has significantly reduced its dependence on Russian fossil fuels", then sets out why that is not the same as the plan working.
Member states have committed EUR 54.3bn of the EUR 300bn in additional investment the Commission said the plan required by 2030, under a fifth. In most national energy and climate plans the auditors found no specific action or target in support of REPowerEU at all. The Recovery Fund chapters attached to it can make "only a limited contribution" to clean generation capacity and cross-border interconnections. Renewable capacity is far short of the 103 GW the plan set as its target. Of the grid measures the plan was supposed to trigger, three were submitted and one has since been dropped.
The Court's sharpest finding is about governance. "The REPowerEU plan still lacks effective governance tools to steer its implementation," the report says, "and EU funding has played only a minor role in ending reliance on Russian oil and gas." The regulation phasing out Russian gas "does not include any provisions imposing direct penalties on member states" that fail to comply. And on oil, the auditors note that Russian crude still arrives indirectly via third countries such as Turkey, China and India, with "no reliable data on how much".
The reduction that did happen, the auditors say, owed part of its size to mild winters and to households and businesses cutting consumption in response to high prices. That is demand destruction, not diversification.
New shipping data published this week shows the other half of the picture. From January to August, EU ports received 11.4mn tonnes of LNG from Novatek's Yamal project in Siberia, according to Kpler figures, 10% more than in the same period of 2025. Zeebrugge in Belgium and the French ports of Dunkirk and Montoir took the largest volumes; cargoes are often shipped onward to other member states after landing.
At spot prices, which have risen to their highest since 2022 because of the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, the NGO Urgewald calculates the EU has paid Russia about EUR 7.3bn for that gas in eight months, more than it spent on Russian LNG in the whole of 2025. Long-term contract discounts would reduce the figure, but not the direction.
The EU's ban on Russian LNG traded under short-term contracts is already in force. It has had a "marginal" effect, said Sebastian Rötters, a campaigner at Urgewald, because Europe has not "reduced consumption" enough and is "ill-prepared" to stop Russian imports by the year-end deadline.
Storage is the pressure point. High prices have left European gas stocks at a record low for the season and Germany is not expected to reach its 70% national filling target. EU Insider reported in August that Regulation (EU) 2026/261 contains a clause pushing the long-term pipeline ban from 30 September 2027 to 1 November 2027 if storage targets are not met for the winter. That clause now looks likely to be used.
Read together, the audit and the shipping data describe one problem. REPowerEU's first job, cutting Russian volumes, was done mainly by sanctions, by price, and by two mild winters. Its second job, the EUR 300bn of renewables, grids and interconnectors that would make the cut permanent, is where the money was supposed to go and where the auditors find it did not. So when a price shock arrives from a different direction, this time Hormuz rather than Ukraine, Europe reaches for the same supplier because the alternative was never built.
The Commission will point to the ban itself, the LNG deadline at the end of 2026 and the full gas phase-out in 2027. The auditors' reply is that a ban with no penalties, no reliable oil data and no governance tools is a target, not an instrument. "We must learn the right lessons now," Kozlovs said, calling for "coordinated efforts to re-energise the plan."
The LNG ban will bite in the coming winter, with storage low, prices at a four-year high and imports from Yamal running above last year. Governments will face a choice between enforcing a ban that has no enforcement and quietly extending it. The European Court of Auditors has now put on the record, before that choice arrives, that the reason it is a hard choice is that the EU spent four years ending a dependence without replacing it. That finding will be quoted every time a member state asks for an exemption.
