In 2022, the world watched in shock as Russian troops crossed into Ukraine—the largest full-scale invasion in Europe since World War II. The response was clear: denounce Moscow’s actions with sanctions, trade restrictions, and diplomatic isolation, and praise the Ukrainian spirit for defending decades of state sovereignty and independence. But then, Russia turned another weapon on Europe: energy.
Natural gas pipelines were shut down, oil imports reduced, and Europe’s largest energy supplier sent prices skyrocketing—dismantling energy security for households and industries across the European Union. Three years later, this energy crisis lingers in Central Europe, where Russian import dependency remains the region’s biggest security vulnerability.
The Visegrád Group (V4) in Central Europe (Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, and Poland) is connected by its Soviet history and regional cooperation as a powerful voting bloc within the EU. But today, the V4 is fractured along a fatal fault line. Poland and Czechia have used the crisis as a catalyst for energy diversification, rapidly expanding LNG capacity, hydrogen systems, and nuclear partnerships. Meanwhile, Hungary and Slovakia continue to import cheap Russian oil.
Hungary and Slovakia’s continued reliance on Russian oil is a politically charged dependency. Their governments frame these imports as a safeguard, ensuring economic protection through the energy trade relationship with Moscow. But this dependence doesn’t prevent them from being a target. Russia has long weaponized energy even against its own trade partners, using pricing and supply manipulation to gain political and economic leverage.
This is the dilemma confronting the EU and Central Europe. In the face of idle V4 cooperation, how can they accelerate diversification in states lacking the political will to pursue secure independence from Russia? The answer may be found in circumventing the need for political will altogether.
Poland and Czechia have the chance to unlock a dormant, radical opportunity with new legislation on the doorstep of their foreign affairs ministries. The recently proposed V2 Strategic Energy Resilience Initiative (SERI) empowers a new wave of energy policy leadership for the region. Rather than relying on the volatile political consensus of national governments, SERI invests in civil society organizations (CSOs), industry associations, and private corporations to drive energy diversification from the ground up. If you’re interested in how exactly this legislation would strengthen Central Europe’s energy security and, thus, reduce the vulnerabilities posed by Russia’s escalating warfare tactics, then keep reading below.
First, SERI authorizes an independent Diversification Grant Program for energy industry associations that are not represented in domestic policymaking spheres. This provision would expand the private sector’s financial capacity to build diverse energy generation and transmission infrastructure. Second, it establishes an information hub for technical knowledge, promoting knowledge sharing among academics and industry experts in each V4 state. And then, SERI implements a framework to initiate public information campaigns that engage CSOs. By educating on the connections among politics, economics, and energy security, this mandate combats potential misinformation and links constrained CSOs to more powerful regional and international networks. This approach transforms bottom-up mobilization into outside-in pressure, holding state governments to their energy commitments.
SERI’s model is grounded in precedents like Poland’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan. While Hungary and Slovakia are admittedly harder cases, these precedents illustrate how diversification begins within the EU framework. These states’ infrastructure, markets, and political institutions are tightly bound to the Russian oligarchy and its supply chains; however, their civil society organizations and regional networks can—and already do—operate in parallel to government activities, promoting long-term energy transitions.
If Poland and Czechia pass and implement SERI, they can reshape the trajectory of V4 cooperation itself. Energy security would cease to be a fault line and instead become a foundation for renewed regional collaboration. Amid Russian threats to Ukraine’s sovereignty and invading the airspace of former Soviet territories, Central Europe’s independence depends on expanding the capacity of its energy sector—and refusing to let inaction dictate its future.
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