Report
June 10, 2026 • 9:00 am ET
Michał Kurtyka, Marcin Gawęda, and Lisa Basquel
For decades, European energy policy rested on a convenient assumption: that physical infrastructure and long-term supply contracts were, together, a sufficient basis for security. The gas crisis that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 exposed that assumption at great cost. Europe moved quickly—diversifying suppliers, commissioning new LNG terminals, expanding regasification capacity across the Baltic, Adriatic, and Aegean coasts. That response was necessary and, by historical standards, impressively fast. But it was not enough.
In From Diversification to Integration, Michał Kurtyka, Marcin Gawęda, and Lisa Basquel argue that Europe has confused the first step in a sequence for the completion of a strategy. Infrastructure, they contend, is a precondition for a functioning market—not a substitute for one. What Central and Eastern Europe still lacks is the regulatory harmonization that converts physical connectivity into genuine cross-border trading, and the commercial depth that would allow fragmented, individually weak buyers to engage on equal terms with global LNG suppliers.
