“The Netherlands is very dependent on both oil and natural gas. More than 80% of the energy mix is ​​fossil fuels,” says Hugo Erken, economist at Rabobank. This is spreading to other parts of the economy. Meat producers, for example, rely on gas byproducts to stun animals for slaughter, meaning shortages drive up prices. Erken expects food inflation to reach 13% in the coming months.

Poland

Ukraine’s neighbor Poland has also refused to pay for natural gas in rubles. It is by far the biggest consumer of coal in the EU, which is often used to heat households and, until recently, was largely imported from Russia. This ban is a key contributor to June’s 14.2% inflation. Her government’s enthusiastic spending has also pushed up prices, according to Mateusz Urban at Oxford Economics. “Poland recovered quite quickly [from Covid]and the fall in GDP was not big to begin with, so if you add to that a fairly generous stimulus that was spent through 2020 and parts of 2021, it translated into a recovery in underlying inflationary pressures that were already quite high before the pandemic,” he says. Even more spending is on the way. Urban says household energy support, higher military spending and a commitment to increase health care spending means “there are a lot of things we have to spend money on.” It adds that even efforts to contain inflation with higher interest rates have been partially hampered by disruptions in mortgage payments, reducing the effectiveness of the policy.

Estonia

Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia have the highest inflation rates in the EU – 22%, 20.5% and 19.2% respectively in June. Close trade ties – due to geography and history – leave the Baltic nations vulnerable to economic hostility from the Kremlin, despite efforts to reduce dependence since the end of the Cold War.