What Ukraine Changed—and What the Strait of Hormuz Exposed
For decades, many global supply chains rewarded efficiency above almost everything else: lean inventories, concentrated production, specialised suppliers, and infrastructure operating close to capacity. The logic is easy to understand. Spare capacity costs money, additional suppliers complicate procurement, and stock that sits unused looks inefficient.
Under ordinary conditions, such systems can work remarkably well. Their weakness appears when the conditions stop being ordinary. A supply chain cannot be judged only by what it costs while every component is available and every route remains open.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced Europe to confront one concentrated energy dependency. The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz in 2026 then tested whether Europe had built genuine resilience or merely exchanged a visible dependence on Russian pipelines for a less visible exposure to global shipping, LNG markets, and common chokepoints.
Editorial update, July 2026: This article was first published on 22 April, after the conflict that began on 28 February had already reduced oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz to a fraction of their previous level. A US–Iran memorandum signed on 18 June reopened the route, and tanker traffic subsequently increased. Recovery remained incomplete: the US Energy Information Administration expected an average of 1.4 million barrels per day of Middle Eastern supply to remain shut in during the fourth quarter of 2026, with most of the remaining production returning in early 2027.
The Cost That Appears Only in Failure
Resilience is often presented as the opposite of efficiency: a choice between lean systems and expensive duplication. Some protective measures do impose obvious costs. Safety stocks tie up capital, back-up suppliers may reduce economies of scale, and redundant infrastructure can sit underused for years.
Duplication is only one form of resilience. A system may also become harder to break through flexible production, visibility into lower tiers of the supply chain, interoperable infrastructure, alternative transport routes, substitutable components, and agreements that allow capacity to be redirected during a crisis. The OECD’s 2025 review of supply-chain resilience distinguishes redundancy from flexibility and organisational responsiveness. Its point is not that buffers are unnecessary, but that reserves without the ability to recognise and respond to disruption may still fail.
The deeper problem is temporal. The cost of maintaining a second supplier appears in this quarter’s accounts; the value of that supplier becomes visible only if the first one fails. A crisis that was prevented produces no dramatic result against which the expense can be measured. During calm periods, preparedness can therefore look like waste precisely because it is working.
Europe Did More Than Switch Suppliers
Europe’s response to Russia’s invasion was more substantial than the original version of this article acknowledged. Russian gas accounted for about 45% of EU gas imports in 2021. By 2025, the share had fallen to 12%. Russian coal had been removed from the EU energy mix, while Russian crude oil had fallen to 2% of EU crude imports.
The physical gas system also changed. According to the European Commission’s four-year assessment of REPowerEU, EU LNG import capacity increased by 76 billion cubic metres between 2021 and 2025, reaching 242 billion cubic metres per year. New floating regasification terminals were deployed, cross-border interconnections were upgraded, and mechanisms for aggregating and jointly purchasing gas were created.
Demand changed alongside supply. Between August 2022 and January 2026, EU gas consumption was about 19% below the five-year pre-crisis reference period. Storage obligations were strengthened, wind and solar generation expanded, and investment in efficiency and electrification reduced some of the demand that new imports would otherwise have had to replace.
These were not marginal adjustments. Europe diversified suppliers, built infrastructure, reduced consumption, and created more capacity to move gas between countries. The system did not merely endure the shock. It rebuilt some of its load-bearing parts.
What it did not do was become independent of external energy flows.
Diversification Changes the Shape of Risk
Reducing dependence on Russian pipeline gas solved a specific problem: too much supply came from one state through infrastructure that could be used as political leverage. LNG offered an escape because cargoes can arrive from several producing countries and be redirected between markets. That flexibility is real, and it gave Europe options that did not exist in 2021.
The same flexibility also binds Europe more closely to the global gas market. A pipeline creates dependence on a particular producer and route, but its flows may be governed by long-term physical and contractual relationships. An LNG cargo can change destination. During a regional shortage that is valuable; during a global shortage it means European buyers must compete with buyers elsewhere for the same mobile supply.
The European Commission describes this as a structural shift. Between 2021 and 2025, LNG’s share of EU gas imports rose from 20% to 45%. Dependence on a single pipeline supplier fell, while exposure to global LNG prices, shipping constraints, and distant disruptions increased.
The dependency did not disappear. It changed scale and geography.
Hormuz as a Stress Test
The Strait of Hormuz makes concentration unusually easy to see. In 2025, nearly 20 million barrels per day of crude oil and oil products passed through it, along with LNG volumes representing about 19% of global trade. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have pipelines capable of bypassing the strait, but the International Energy Agency estimates their available capacity at only 3.5 to 5.5 million barrels per day. The alternative routes could soften a closure, not replace the main channel.
When conflict effectively closed the strait in 2026, exports fell below 10% of their pre-conflict level. Producers curtailed output as storage filled, oil and gas prices rose, and Asian importers faced the most immediate physical shortages. Europe imported relatively little Gulf oil directly, but its greater reliance on globally traded LNG transmitted the disruption through prices.
The response was not limited to improvised rerouting or faith that higher prices would eventually clear the market. IEA members agreed to make 400 million barrels of emergency oil available, the largest coordinated stock release in the agency’s history. Producers used the limited bypass routes, exporters outside the Gulf increased supply, and governments adopted measures to reduce demand.
These were resources purchased before the emergency: reserves, pipelines, international agreements, spare capacity, and institutions able to coordinate their use. They reduced the damage but could not make the chokepoint irrelevant. After the 18 June agreement reopened the strait, tanker traffic recovered faster than production. Stranded cargoes began moving, but inventories had been depleted and millions of barrels per day remained shut in.
Hormuz did not show that resilience had failed. It showed what resilience can and cannot do. It buys time, preserves options, and limits cascading damage. It does not abolish physical constraint.
Substitution, Diversification, and Transformation
Three different responses are often grouped together under the language of resilience. Substitution replaces one supplier or route with another. It may be essential during a crisis, but it can simply transfer concentration elsewhere. Diversification creates several viable suppliers and routes, reducing the damage caused by the loss of any one of them. Those alternatives may nevertheless share exposure to the same shipping system, commodity market, or geopolitical region.
Transformation reduces the need for the vulnerable input. Europe used all three approaches after 2022. It substituted Russian pipeline gas with LNG and other pipeline supplies, diversified import sources and terminals, and reduced gas demand through efficiency, behavioural change, renewable generation, and electrification.
Transformation offers the deepest resilience because it removes part of the exposure rather than merely rearranging it. A second gas supplier protects a building against the failure of the first supplier. A building that requires less gas is less exposed to both.
This is not an argument for complete national self-sufficiency. International trade creates flexibility, spreads production risks, and allows supply to move towards shortages. The aim is not independence from the world. It is avoiding a design in which one failure removes too many options at once.
Who Pays for Preparedness?
No single actor sees a modern supply chain from end to end. Firms decide how much inventory to carry and whether to qualify alternative suppliers. Infrastructure operators decide how networks are maintained and connected. Governments set storage obligations, emergency-stock rules, competition policy, and contingency plans. International organisations coordinate responses that individual states could not organise alone.
Responsibility is distributed, but the benefits of resilience are distributed even more widely. A company may pay the full cost of spare capacity while customers, suppliers, competitors, and the broader economy share the benefit when that capacity prevents a shutdown. A rival carrying no buffer may offer lower prices during ordinary years and rely on the prepared firm’s continued operation during the crisis.
This resembles the wider problem of individually defensible choices producing collectively costly outcomes. If preparedness benefits the system more than the actor purchasing it, competitive markets may provide too little unless regulation, contracts, procurement rules, or insurance arrangements reward it before failure occurs.
Robustness is not inevitably competed away. It is competed away when nobody pays for it until after it is needed.
What a Shock Actually Teaches
Shocks reveal dependencies that ordinary performance conceals. A factory shutdown exposes several industries’ reliance on one obscure component. A pipeline interruption reveals that supposedly diverse suppliers share the same route. A maritime closure shows that alternative infrastructure exists at only a fraction of the capacity implied by a map.
Exposure is not the same as learning. Organisations can classify a crisis as exceptional, repair the immediate damage, and return to the incentives that created the vulnerability. Emergency capacity may decay when prices normalise. Temporary diversification may disappear when the cheapest supplier becomes available again.
Learning becomes durable only when it is embedded in infrastructure, contracts, information systems, standards, and institutions. Europe’s response to Ukraine mattered because much of it became physical or legal: terminals were built, interconnections expanded, storage rules strengthened, joint purchasing mechanisms tested, and demand reduced.
Hormuz revealed the limits of those achievements without cancelling them. Europe was better protected against coercion by one supplier and remained exposed to a disruption affecting global fossil-fuel trade. Every redesign creates a new map of dependencies. LNG terminals create flexibility but rely on ships and international cargoes. Interconnections distribute supply while also transmitting price shocks. Strategic reserves buy time but cannot replace disrupted production indefinitely.
The lesson from Ukraine is therefore not that Europe solved energy dependence. It is that systems can learn when a shock leaves behind new capacity and new rules. The response to Hormuz worked as well as it did because reserves existed, bypass routes existed, demand had already fallen, and institutions were able to coordinate.
A shock teaches nothing by itself. The lesson is the set of options that still exists after the emergency has passed.
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