Poland’s largest energy company, state-owned Orlen, has ended its last contract for Russian crude oil and halted these imports, declaring finally that it has “freed the region from Russian crude oil”.

The oil imports were used to feed one of the company’s refineries in Czech in a relationship that has been working since Soviet times. However, since the war in Ukraine started more than three years ago, Warsaw has actively worked to end its dependence.

The job has been made easier thanks to Poland’s long-standing mistrust of the Kremlin that led to the investment of a gas pipeline link with Norway, the Baltic pipeline, which came online in October 2022, allowing the immediate end of gas imports from Russia. Sourcing crude oil for its refinery was harder, with Norwegian crude arriving in Poland via tankers to the Naftoport terminal in Gdańsk,.

The termination of the last Russian crude imports is part of a wider plan floated by the EU to end gas imports from Russia by 2027, but as bne IntelliNews reported, that will be difficult, as the EU still doesn’t have an adequate alternative to replace Russia’s LNG, which still accounts for some 19% of the European energy mix. Direct oil imports were already ended with the introduction of twin sanctions on crude and oil products at the end of 2022.

“Money from Russian oil will no longer be used against those whom it should not be used against,” Orlen chief executive Ireneusz Fąfara said on June 30, as cited by Notes from Poland. “People in Ukraine will not die thanks to money from Russian oil.”

The oil arrived by the traditional Soviet-built Druzhba (“Friendship”) pipeline to Orlen’s Czech refinery in Litvinov under a 12-year contract with Russia’s state oil producer Rosneft, which has now expired.

The pipeline, which delivered crude to landlocked Central European countries including Slovakia and Hungary, had been exempted from the EU’s embargo on Russian oil due to the lack of alternative supplies for several nations in Central Europe. As the Druzhba pipeline supplied these countries for decades during Soviet times, there is no pipeline infrastructure linking the Central European states to the Baltic or North Sea coasts.

Orlen had already ended imports of Russian oil to its refineries in Poland and Lithuania in March 2023. However, its Czech subsidiary, Unipetrol, continued to receive Russian crude under the legacy contract, which even saw the volume of imports increase in 2023.

Orlen’s Ireneusz credited the decision to strong coordination with the Polish government and regional infrastructure partners. “Ending Orlen’s dependence on Russian energy resources was possible primarily thanks to the support of the Polish government and good cooperation with our partners, in particular transmission system operators,” he said. “It is thanks to this that we can import oil and gas from alternative directions.”

Orlen pointed to the expanded capacity of the Transalpine Pipeline (TAL), which now supplies oil from the Italian port of Trieste to the Czech Republic via Austria and Germany, as a key enabler of the transition. The Czech pipeline operator MERO used the EU-granted exemption to upgrade the system, allowing it to replace Russian volumes with seaborne crude.

In April, Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala hailed the arrival of non-Russian supplies. “After roughly 60 years, our dependence on Russia [for oil] has ended,” Reuters reported him as saying.

Orlen has also reconfigured its Litvinov refinery – until now reliant solely on Russian blends – to process a wider range of crude grades, further enhancing its ability to source oil globally.