My guest is Dita Yul Juergenson. Dita Yul Juergensen. Dita Yul Juergensen.

Dieter Yul Juergensen is the Director General of the Directorate General of Energy at the European Commission.

Welcome to the podcast, Dita.

Thank you very much, Paul.

Great too.

I'll be here.

Right.

Okay.

Well, let's obviously talk about Ukraine, how not to talk about Ukraine.

And whether you call it a crisis or not,

issues surrounding the EU's security of energy supply obviously predate Russia's invasion of Ukraine

in February. So could you give a flavour how the debate has changed amongst Europe's leaders

when you attend and take part in discussions at the highest level in Brussels.

Yes, I would be glad to do that because I think maybe the shortest and simplest answer to that

is it has brought a different urgency, a higher degree of urgency to the conversation around the

energy crisis, but also around the energy transition and the need to

shift our energy systems away from the high level of dependence on Russia, but also the high level of

dependence on fossil fuels. Maybe if you take a step back before the invasion, because as you rightly

said, the energy crisis actually preceded the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because the global market

situation, in particular in natural gas

was a challenging one. What we've seen because of COVID is that a lot of the investments

into increasing supply of natural gas into global markets, that investment was delayed because

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