The European Union bans Russian LNG imports on 1st January 2027. In the first half of this year the EU bought a record 9.97 million tonnes of it, up 16% on the year, equal to roughly 97% of everything the Yamal plant produced in that period. The regulation imposing the ban also carries a carve-out. Its stated purpose, written into the Official Journal, is to avoid "any increase" in the export revenues Russia derives from those transfers. Not to reduce them. To avoid an increase. Article 3ra(6) entered force on 24th July. It permits EU operators to keep transferring Russian LNG to non-EU buyers, and to keep purchasing it for that purpose, under contracts signed before 24th February 2022 that run longer than a year and have not been amended since. Each operator is capped at whatever volume it moved in 2025. The mechanism underneath deserves more attention than the headline. Sanctions on Russia expire unless every member state votes to renew them, which is why the six-month rollover has been a recurring hostage negotiation since 2022. This exemption runs the other way. It lasts until 25th July 2027, then renews automatically for successive one-year periods unless the Council decides otherwise. Council decisions on sanctions require unanimity. So the sanction needs unanimity to survive, and the carve-out needs unanimity to die. One member state can collapse the ban. One member state can also keep the exemption alive indefinitely. The exception is structurally more durable than the rule it was carved out of. It arrived by the same route. Greece delayed adoption of the package until protections were included for its shipping industry, per Financial Times reporting picked up across European outlets. Euronews reported that other member states were aghast at reopening a text that had already become EU law, and feared the precedent it would set. Concentration is what gives it force. One company, Dynagas, operates five of the fifteen specialised Arc7 icebreaking carriers built for Yamal, vessels that cannot be casually replaced. The research group Urgewald calculates it moved 2.35 billion euros of Russian LNG to EU customers in the first seven months of this year, and carries roughly 22% of all Russian LNG exports. Then there is geography, which nobody legislated. Yamal sits in the Arctic. Rerouting its cargoes east becomes significantly more expensive when the Northern Sea Route is closed by ice, typically December through June. The import ban starts on 1st January, inside the ice window. For half of each year the cheap route for that gas points at Europe, and from January Europe is closed to it as a destination but not as a carrier. The disclosure regime is unusually sharp. Operators must report their 2025 transfer volumes to national regulators by 25th August, then file quarterly data identifying vessel, ports, buyer, destination, cargo value and gross revenue. That is a commercial map of the Russian LNG trade sitting inside member state files. The test is clean. After 1st January, EU imports should fall hard. If EU operator transfers fall with them, this reading is wrong. If imports drop while transfers hold near their 2025 cap, the ban will have changed where the cargo lands without changing who carries it, who earns the freight, or what Russia is paid. Europe spent four years learning to buy less Russian gas. It has now written into law the conditions under which its own companies keep selling it.