Gazprom Increasing Natural Gas Exports to Georgia

Gazprom Increasing Natural Gas Exports to Georgia

Executive Summary:

• On January 14, Russian energy giant Gazprom announced its natural gas supplies to Georgia increased by more than 40 percent between 2024 and 2025. Russian natural gas supplies to Georgia have been growing steadily since 2021, strengthening Moscow’s influence over Georgian energy supplies.
• Moscow has repeatedly wielded energy access to exert pressure on Georgia. In 2006, during a crisis in Russian–Georgian relations, Russia completely cut off fuel supplies to Georgia following a suspicious gas pipeline explosion in North Ossetia.
• The Georgian opposition and independent experts say that an increased share of Russian gas in Georgia’s energy market will lead to greater deference to Moscow. Georgia’s increasing Azerbaijani natural gas supplies, in contrast, have historically strengthened the country’s pro-Western development.

On January 13, several Georgian media outlets, including Formula TV and Business Media Georgia, reported that the Georgian Government published a decree, dated December 20, 2025, on its official website with an annex containing details of a deal between Gazprom Export and the Georgian Oil and Gas Corporation (GOGC) (Business Media Georgia, January 13; Facebook/TVFormula, accessed February 4). The government soon removed the decree (Business Media Georgia, January 15). The decree provided information on the cost of natural gas purchased from Gazprom, a Russian majority-state-owned oil company. The Georgian government still published the annex to the document together with the decree, despite it being formally classified as a commercial secret. This deal is another example of Moscow wielding energy access to exert pressure on Georgia to strengthen its influence over the country.

The annex describes how the natural gas GOGC purchases from Gazprom is then sold to State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR)–Georgia gas, Georgia’s largest gas distributor. The contract states that the price for the first 250 million cubic meters of Russian gas is $215 per 1,000 cubic meters, and any volume above 2050 cubic meters is sold at $185 per 1,000 cubic meters (Business Media Georgia, January 13). Business Media Georgia previously reported that Georgia had been paying $185 per 1,000 cubic meters in 2023 and 2024, based on import volumes and total payments. The government had not officially disclosed these details until now (Business Media Georgia,  January 13).

The annex disappeared from the government’s official site shortly after these independent media reports. On January 15, Georgia’s State Security Service (SSSG) said it launched a criminal investigation into “sabotage” and the “unauthorized penetration of a government computer system.” The SSSG claims, “The investigation was initiated on the basis of information received from the Administration of the Government of Georgia, stating that a suspected cyberattack and certain manipulations were carried out on the administration’s website” (Tvpirveli, January 20).

David Avalishvili, from the Georgian outlet Nation.ge, said in a January 24 interview with this author that the documents were presumably published by mistake by government employees, and Gazprom could sue Georgia for disclosing classified information (Author’s Interview, January 24).

The scandal surrounding the publication of secret agreements with the Russian energy giant only confirmed unofficial reports that, starting in 2021 and 2022, Gazprom has been steadily increasing its share of the Georgian natural gas market. Experts were able to accurately calculate the specific volumes of natural gas supplied from Russia and identified an upward trend in the amounts Georgia paid Russia for the gas, despite the specific volumes never being officially published (Radio Tavisupleba, January 13; Civil Georgia, January 14). Geostat, the Georgian government statistics agency, regularly published these figures (Geostat, accessed February 4). According to these calculations and the Natural Gas Balance approved by the Ministry of Economy, Georgia purchased 200 million cubic meters of gas from Russia in 2021. This volume amounts to just 7.32 percent of Georgia’s total gas consumption for 2021, which was 2.73 billion cubic meters. In 2021, gas from Azerbaijan accounted for 92.3 of Georgia’s total consumption. On January 14, Gazprom confirmed that it supplied 40.4 percent more gas to Georgia in 2025 than in 2024 as part of a broader increase in gas exports to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Central Asia, and the South Caucasus (Telegram/@gazprom, January 12; Civil Georgia, January 14).

Former president of the State (Central) Bank of Georgia, economics and energy expert Roman Gotsiridze, told this author that Gazprom’s natural gas exports to Georgia reached 1.1 billion cubic meters in 2025 (Author’s Interview, January 20). Georgia’s total consumption last year was 3.2 billion cubic meters. Gotsiridze said, “Georgia also receives 5 percent of its natural gas as transit fees for natural gas from the Caspian shelf that runs through the South Caucasus pipeline, which belongs to the British petroleum-led ‘Shah Deniz consortium’” (Author’s Interview, January 20). According to Gotsiridze, following the agreement between Georgia’s state energy company  and the Shah Deniz consortium, Georgia is purchasing another 500 million cubic meters of natural gas from the consortium at a preferential price, which in 2025 was only $70 per 1,000 cubic meter. Going on, he said:

In total, Georgia received about 1.7 billion cubic meters of natural gas from the consortium free of charge or at a reduced price … Until recently, almost all remaining natural gas in Georgia was supplied by the Azerbaijani state energy company SOCAR (Author’s Interview, January 20).

The expert expressed confidence that Gazprom reached an agreement with SOCAR to increase Russian natural gas supplies to Georgia. In doing so, “Azerbaijan received the opportunity to sell more of its gas … to Türkiye and Europe” (Author’s Interview, January 20).

Petre Tsiskarishvili, general secretary of the United National Movement (UNM) opposition party, argued that dependence on Russian gas has often had tragic consequences for Georgia (Author’s Interview, December 17, 2025). He recalled the 2006 gas pipeline explosion on Russian territory, which left Georgia without fuel during a cold winter (Civil Georgia, January 22, 2006). Tsiskarishvili said:

We never doubted that this was an act of sabotage by Moscow aimed at punishing Georgia for its pro-Western course. That is why our government, under President Mikheil Saakashvili, developed relations with Azerbaijan and the international consortium, not Gazprom (Author’s Interview, December 17, 2025).

Georgia received 10 percent of its natural gas as payment for the transit of Russian gas to Armenia until 2017, when Gazprom forced the Georgian authorities to agree to the “monetization” of the transit fee (Civil Georgia, January 11, 2017). This change was Moscow’s first step in a long-term strategy to increase its influence over Georgia through the energy sector. By 2025, thanks to this strategy, Moscow had increased its share of the Georgian natural gas market from 7.32 percent to 25–30 percent, and it appears there is more to come. These trends indicate that Moscow will continue to exert pressure on Georgia through the natural gas market, maintaining its position in the South Caucasian country and Tbilisi’s deference to Moscow.