The Three Seas Initiative (3SI) — a 13-nation geopolitical grouping to integrate Central and Eastern Europe — has gathered much brand value but also much dust since it first met in 2016.
Now, with the EU’s Polish presidency for the next six months, Donald Trump’s return to the White House, and the end of the Russian gas transit via Ukraine, it has the opportunity to find new dynamism.
The 13 3SI states, stretching from the Baltic countries in the north to Bulgaria and Greece in the south, have long been expecting their vision to materialize primarily around large infrastructure projects like roads and rail.
Nevertheless, the odds of success may be higher if 3SI countries, with some help from their Nordic neighbors, started to discuss the integration of two major gas corridors to join up in Ukraine and Moldova.
The expiry of the Russian gas transit agreement with Ukraine on January 1 has created an opportunity for Kyiv and Warsaw to renew discussions about accessing gas supplies from the North Sea, or importing liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Poland.
There has been at least partial progress along these lines. At the end of 2024, the Polish gas grid operator, GAZ-SYSTEM offered capacity to Ukraine for companies looking to import gas.
Ukrainian and regional companies could, in principle, access not only gas from Norway and Denmark thanks to Poland’s subsea Baltic Pipeline, but also LNG imported via Poland’s Świnoujście terminal, in the country’s far northwest. In the longer term, the corridor could also be used for “green gas” coming from biomethane installations along the route.
Furthermore, existing infrastructure between the Polish and Lithuanian LNG ports, as well as plans by Poland to commission another LNG terminal in Gdansk could bring a combined 25 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas annually to the region by the end of the decade.
That would be around 10 billion cubic meters more than the 15bcm of Russian gas transiting Ukraine last year.
The real benefits would lie not only from the opportunity to tap alternative supplies at a time when surging LNG volumes reaching the global market in the next five years are expected to make energy costs more competitive.
The value of such a project linking Norway and Denmark to Poland and then further south to Ukraine would be further enhanced if it merged with an existing vertical south-north corridor linking gas supplies entering the Balkans from the south to Ukraine via Bulgaria, Romania, and Moldova.
Ukraine and Moldova, which boast from large transport infrastructure, would be right at the heart of the two intersecting corridors, taking advantage not only of multiple sources of supply but also of transit revenue, sitting astride a bidirectional gas highway.
Furthermore, Ukraine’s vast gas storage capacity, one of the world’s largest, is ideally placed at the center of this emerging arc stretching from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the east and the Aegean Sea in the south.
The integrated gas corridors might render futile the inevitable, future Russian attempts to revive the sabotaged Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea.
The Nord Stream lines were designed to divide Europe but a consolidated corridor from the Baltic to the Aegean Sea would provide sufficient supplies to the region, while also helping them to integrate further.
The infrastructure already exists and requires no major additional investments, at least for now.
Politically, President Trump has made a clear demand that Europe import more US LNG or face increased tariffs. The EU runs a $240bn trade surplus with the US.
More recently, the Nordic and Baltic countries have been showing a lot of support not only to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion of 2022 but also to Moldova which has suffered three energy crises at the hands of Russia in almost as many years.
The steadfast political and financial support of the Nordic and Baltic countries granted to Ukraine and Moldova has been exemplary, but their involvement in seeing a fully integrated gas corridor would take the 3SI vision much further.
While there are many encouraging signs that an integrated gas corridor may materialize, there are also many obstacles.
So far Ukrainian companies have failed to buy substantial quantities of gas from Poland because of Polish requirements for long-term import commitments. Technical bottlenecks in southeast Poland have also limited cross-border capacity.
Further down, along the south-north corridor linking the Balkans to Moldova, exorbitant transport costs charged by regional grid operators make the route uncompetitive.
This fragmentation of the region either because of technical or regulatory constraints plays to Russia’s advantage at a time when it is struggling to recover its lost market share in Europe since the 2022 energy crisis.
For Europe, the benefits are manifold but for the project to materialize, there is a serious need for compromise and dedicated political engagement.
Will the Polish presidency of the EU and the incoming Trump administration bring the project closer to fruition?
Dr. Aura Sabadus is a senior energy journalist writing for Independent Commodity Intelligence Services (ICIS), a London-based global energy and petrochemicals news and market data provider. She is also a Non-resident Senior Fellow with the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
Wojciech Jakóbik is an analyst based in Warsaw and founder of the Polish-based Energy Security Center. He writes extensively about energy-related issues in Poland and the region. He holds a post-graduate degree in political international relations and is a lecturer at the College of Eastern Europe at the University of Warsaw.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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