This has been a bad week for Europe’s energy consumers, but a satisfying one for Vladimir Putin. European benchmark gas prices on Friday were six times higher than a year ago — but did fall back from an all-time high midweek after Russia’s president suggested Moscow might be prepared to stabilise prices. Politicians once consoled themselves that Russia could never afford to cut off gas to Europe since that would crash its economy. Recent weeks have shown Moscow has no need to turn off the taps: in a supply crunch, it can exert outsize influence even while continuing to fulfil all its long-term contracts, simply by withholding any extra gas.

The energy squeeze that has clouded the economic outlook and put markets on edge is a global affair. A rebound in activity is confronting post-pandemic bottlenecks. Coronavirus and a long winter led to delays in filling energy storage and backlogs of maintenance in some oil, gas and coal fields. India and China are experiencing shortages too.

Moves away from coal, and in some countries nuclear power, have made gas more important as an industrial fuel and, despite the advance of renewables, for power generation. Europe has suffered, too, from partial closure of the giant Groningen gasfield due to earthquakes in the Netherlands and diversion of liquefied natural gas supplies to Asia. Yet if Russia did not engineer the squeeze, it has taken advantage of it, traders say, by declining to send additional supplies into the spot market to calm things as it has in the past. The International Energy Agency chief says Russia has capacity to send substantially more gas to Europe.