Baltic ports and energy logistics after the Russia decoupling, 2023-2026

By 2025, the physical infrastructure of Europe's split from Russian energy and transit had largely moved from announcement to operation. Poland's Naftoport handled a record 37.4 million tonnes of crude oil, the Port of Gdańsk overall handled 80.4 million tonnes of cargo, and Baltic Hub's container terminal there set an 18-year record of 2.77 million TEU. Across the sea, Ukrainian drones were now striking Russia's own Baltic oil-export ports, Primorsk and Ust-Luga, on a near-weekly cadence. This report tracks five things paying readers need with dates and units attached: how much LNG regasification capacity the region actually has now; how oil is really flowing since Russian pipeline supply to Germany stopped; which ports grew and which shrank in 2025; what Rail Baltica now actually costs; and who -- financially and, in one live tender, geopolitically -- is paying to build the next round of capacity.

Poland has effectively doubled its LNG import capacity mid-decade: Świnoujście's third tank and second jetty took it to 8.3 billion cubic metres a year from January 2025, and a second terminal is now rising in the Gulf of Gdańsk, its breakwater contract signed in March 2025 for roughly PLN 800 million. Gaz-System's own president put the new terminal's 6.1 bcm/year capacity at 'almost a third' of Poland's total gas consumption once it opens.

Lithuania's KN, meanwhile, has already sold out its Klaipėda terminal's capacity through 2033 and shelved a plan to expand it, after 2033-onward capacity drew only a fraction of the interest. Klaipėda's 2025 LNG throughput itself rose 19% to 2.4 million tonnes as the FSRU came back online after maintenance -- one part of a record year for the port across almost every cargo category.

Finland's Inkoo terminal, built in the scramble after the Balticconnector pipeline to Estonia ruptured in October 2023, has settled into a smaller but steady role -- more than 5 bcm/year of capacity, with only two long-term slots so far booked for 2027. It is the smaller Baltic states that pulled back hardest: Estonia's government declined, in November 2022, to buy into the Finnish terminal at all, redirecting the money to its own gas reserve and instead buying out a private mooring quay at Paldiski that, years later, still has no FSRU attached to it.

Latvia went further, killing its own Skulte terminal outright in August 2023 -- its energy minister said existing regional capacity made a fourth terminal unnecessary, even as the auditor's own report had already flagged legal problems with Paldiski's quay. Read together, these are not simply cancellations: they look like a rational, if unglamorous, bet by the region's smaller economies to free-ride on capacity Poland and Lithuania were building anyway.

On the western side of the Baltic, Poland's Naftoport -- the country's only maritime crude-intake point since Russian pipeline imports were halted -- handled a record 37.4 million tonnes of crude in 2025, with the wider Port of Gdańsk's liquid-fuels segment reaching 39.6 million tonnes. PERN, Naftoport's majority owner, is already building a sixth berth, budgeted around PLN 500 million and due in the second half of 2028, that would push total capacity to 49 million tonnes a year.

Kazakh crude is becoming a formal part of this route: PERN and Kazakhstan's KazTransOil signed an operator agreement, effective from 1 January 2026, covering delivery scheduling and metering at their shared hand-over point -- the plumbing behind headlines about Kazakh oil replacing Russian barrels at Schwedt.

On the Russian side of the sea, Ust-Luga -- Russia's largest Baltic terminal and second-largest port nationally -- ships around 700,000 barrels of crude a day and exported more than 32.8 million tonnes of refined products in 2025; Primorsk can move over a million barrels a day on its own. Since March 2026 both have become recurring targets: Ukrainian drones hit Primorsk's fuel reservoirs on 23 March, both ports reportedly suspended operations, and Ust-Luga was struck again in August and, most recently in this research, on 1 September 2026.

• 23 Mar 2026 -- Drones hit Primorsk fuel reservoirs; Primorsk and Ust-Luga both reportedly suspend operations
• 14 Aug 2026 -- Ust-Luga struck again, fire ignited
• 1 Sep 2026 -- Ust-Luga hit a third time in this window; 52-drone, four-hour assault over the Leningrad region; fire out by ~09:30 Moscow time, no casualties reported

Gdańsk again set the pace: 80.4 million tonnes overall (+3.9%) and 2.8 million TEU (+23%) across its terminals, led by Baltic Hub's 2,766,475-TEU record on its newly commissioned third quay. Baltic Hub -- owned jointly by PSA International, Poland's sovereign development fund and IFM Global Infrastructure Fund -- added a further PLN 220.6 million of EU co-financing in June 2026 for electrification and a longer rail siding.

Gdynia's total tonnage actually fell 4.4% on weaker coal and grain, but it crossed 1 million TEU in containers for the first time in its history, up 5.27%, helped by new Gemini Cooperation, MSC and Finnlines services and a widened turntable able to berth 400-metre ships -- all while a key quay was under renovation.

Klaipėda had, on the numbers, the best year in the region: 39 million tonnes overall (a record, 41.4% Baltic market share), 1,308,687 TEU (+22%), and record ro-ro and ferry-vehicle volumes -- though not every segment rose, with timber, scrap metal and grain all down as Ukraine shifted grain exports back through its own reopened Black Sea terminals.

Tallinn and Helsinki told more mixed stories. AS Tallinna Sadam's own disclosed figures show 13.8 million tonnes (+5.1%) but essentially flat containers, 259,398 TEU, down 0.9% -- notably weaker than some secondary summaries suggested. Helsinki's total cargo fell 4.7% to 13.4 million tonnes even as its containers grew 9.5% to about 486,000 TEU.

Latvia's Riga reported 16.8 million tonnes of cargo handled in 2025 on its own current statistics page -- down from the 18.8 million tonnes it reported for 2023 -- though this research could not independently confirm a precise 2025 container-TEU figure for Riga in any source it actually opened, despite such a figure circulating in secondary aggregation.

Zoom out to the national level and Poland's own 2024 data (the latest full national comparison available) show all three of its port complexes growing profits and containers together: Gdańsk remained the EU's fifth-busiest port by weight overall in 2023 Eurostat data -- behind only Amsterdam, Hamburg, Antwerp-Bruges and Rotterdam, and second in the Baltic Sea behind only Russia's Ust-Luga -- while Szczecin-Świnoujście actually posted the fastest 2024 container growth of the three (+11.4%), ahead of Gdańsk (+9.7%) and Gdynia (+8.3%). The same ministry data point to further capacity being added behind the headline numbers: a Gdańsk grain terminal is being expanded fivefold in storage and the Elbląg waterway is being deepened to let Elbląg function as a seaport by Q2 2026.

Rail Baltica's headline number keeps moving in one direction. A 2017 cost-benefit analysis put the 870-km Tallinn-to-Polish-border line at €5.8 billion; the most recent cost-benefit analysis puts it at about €23.8 billion, with the first phase alone estimated at €14.3 billion (€5.5 billion of it in Latvia). The line is now at least five years behind its original schedule, with first-phase completion pushed to 2030.

A June-2024 joint review by the three Baltic states' Supreme Audit Institutions put the resulting budget deficit at €10-19 billion depending on scope, and flagged a two-year EU funding gap in 2027-28 between Multiannual Financial Framework periods, alongside CEF money already at risk of clawback for missed deadlines -- €8 million in Estonia, €4 million in Latvia, €71.5 million in Lithuania as of that review.

By 2026 the risk had become concrete in Latvia: redesigning the costliest section near Iecava cut its projected shortfall from €180-190 million to about €45 million (construction cost down from €686m to roughly €465m) -- but not a metre of embankment had yet been built there, and Latvia separately risked having to return close to €50 million already drawn from EU funds, including €25.7 million earmarked from the Military Mobility Fund for a Daugava bridge whose engineering turned out too costly.

Poland broke ground in July 2026 on 'Cape Pomerania,' a €2.3 billion deepwater container port at Świnoujście designed to add 2 million TEU/year of capacity by 2030 -- alone, roughly half of all Polish ports' combined 2025 container volume -- with 186 hectares of reclaimed land, a 17-metre basin and explicit dual civil-defence use built in from the start.

Lithuania is making a comparable bet at Klaipėda: site preparation began in mid-2026 for the port's largest-ever expansion, a new southern port area whose first stage -- breakwaters contracted to Tilsta for €24.5 million -- is the leading edge of nearly €600 million of the port's 2026-2029 investment programme, part of a development the port authority expects to exceed €1 billion with future private investors. A separate €55.5 million Nordic Investment Bank credit facility is funding a €111 million package that folds in decarbonisation -- onshore power and Lithuania's first green-hydrogen refuelling hub -- alongside navigational upgrades; a much earlier, 2013-vintage NIB loan had already deepened Klaipėda's channel to the 14.5m/150m benchmark that later reporting continues to cite.

The most consequential financing decision now pending, though, is not in Poland or Lithuania but at Gdynia. Its Outer Port -- a PLN 5 billion (about €1.15 billion) dual-use container terminal explicitly built to support NATO logistics -- is being procured as a public-private partnership, and of the four consortia shortlisted, two reportedly carry Chinese state ties: Hutchison Ports Poland (CK Hutchison) and Mota-Engil Central Europe (part-owned by China Communications Construction Company). Final bids are due 30 September 2026.

Beyond the Outer Port, Gdynia is already building a PLN 75 million EU-co-financed intermodal rail terminal explicitly for 'dual, civil-military use' -- 750-metre sidings and a heavy-vehicle ramp due by late 2026 -- while Lithuania's LTG Infra broke ground in May 2026 on a €37.4 million gauge-break hub at Palemonas, near Kaunas, built to move NATO cargo arriving on European 1,435mm track onto the 1,520mm broad-gauge network toward Latvia, Estonia and Klaipėda.

These sit inside a bigger EU push: the Connecting Europe Facility has co-funded 95 military-mobility projects across 21 member states since 2021 with a €1.74 billion budget, fully committed by 2023, and a new legislative package agreed at Council level in June 2026 aims to harmonise cross-border permissions and build a rapid-response transport pool by the end of 2026. The same July-2025 CEF Transport round also funded new Baltic-class icebreakers for Finland, Sweden and Estonia -- Finland's roughly €42 million share of an €80.78 million joint project, due in service by 2029.

Some claims in wide circulation about this topic did not survive a check against a source this research actually opened. Riga's precise 2025 container-TEU figure, the exact ownership stakes behind two of Gdynia's Outer Port bidders, and a specific '2026-2029, over €1 billion' framing for parts of Klaipėda's investment programme are all recorded here with lower confidence, or excluded, rather than stated as settled fact.

On decarbonisation, the region's most concrete step is Klaipėda's, bundling green-hydrogen refuelling and onshore power into its main NIB-financed capacity package, alongside a concept design for an 800-tonne green-methanol bunkering vessel able to supply up to 250,000 tonnes of methanol a year. On cyber risk, this research found a documented, disruptive attack on a Russian port operator's coal and fertiliser shipments in November 2025, but no independently confirmed attack on a Baltic-state port's own systems in the 2023-2026 window -- a gap worth flagging to the research queue rather than filling with assumption.