Europe needs Russia to survive amid an energy crisis, Kirill Dmitriev, the Russian president's special representative for investment and economic cooperation with foreign countries and head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), said, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported on May 31.

His remarks followed a Bloomberg report the same day that the EU was weighing a temporary freeze of the price cap on Russian oil as the war in the Middle East entered a fourth month.

The bloc's dynamic mechanism had ratcheted the cap down to $44.10 per barrel from February 1, a reduction driven largely by elevated oil prices tied to Middle Eastern tensions, with EU energy costs reported to have surged to around $600mn a day amid the conflict. The threshold is due for review later in the summer.

"As predicted, the energy crisis is forcing the EU to be more realistic and to start correcting past mistakes. Europe needs Russia to survive," Dmitriev wrote on the social platform X.

The EU and the G7 first set the seaborne crude cap at $60 per barrel in December 2022, coordinating the measure to reduce Moscow's revenue without pulling supply off the market.

The bloc later adopted an automatic mechanism resetting the threshold every six months at 15% below the average market rate for Russian Urals crude. Russian oil has routinely traded above the cap through a shadow fleet of tankers and intermediary buyers.

The discussions form part of preparations for a 21st sanctions package, under which officials are weighing whether to drop the automatic reduction or hold the ceiling at $60 per barrel, according to Bloomberg.

A separate proposal to permanently ban Russian oil imports has been delayed amid the price spikes driven by the Middle East war.

The internal split runs deepest over landlocked Central Europe. Hungary and Slovakia have launched legal action against an EU ban on Russian gas and threatened the same over oil, while both remain locked in a dispute with Ukraine over the Druzhba pipeline, which carries Russian crude through Ukrainian territory.

Earlier, analyst Sergei Pikin said Hungary and Slovakia would be forced to abandon Russian gas under EU pressure.

He said Brussels was pushing for a unified line on energy restrictions despite the positions of individual member states, with the bloc having already discussed a full ban on Russian gas supplies from 2027.