The European Union finally announced its latest package of proposed sanctions on Russia, after a week spent trying to satisfy nearly impossible demands by U.S. President Donald Trump for Europe to pile even more pressure on the Kremlin.
The measures flagged in the EU’s 19th sanctions package, while still incremental, and subject to approval by all EU member states, would represent a significant tightening of Europe’s efforts to cut out the financial and material underpinnings of Moscow’s war machine.
The EU’s slow-but-steady economic onslaught, which coincides with Ukraine’s own aerial offensive against the physical underpinnings of the Russian oil industry, stands in sharp contrast to U.S. inaction. Since Trump took office, the United States has taken no additional steps to increase sanctions pressure on Russia, though it has tried to browbeat India, a big buyer of Russian oil, through tariffs.
On Thursday, in a press conference with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Trump said that Russian President Vladimir Putin “has really let me down,” but Trump reiterated that he will not take additional action until Europe moves first and further to squeeze Russia and its main customers.
The growing bifurcation between Europe and the United States regarding pressure on Russia matters, because only the U.S. Treasury and the global role of the U.S. dollar and U.S. financial system can put real teeth into any sanctions measures, whether those meant to cut off Russian energy earnings or those meant to penalize third-country partners and customers.
But the EU’s latest package does go after three broad baskets that are designed to further squeeze a Russian economy that is already wheezing: energy, finance, and the defense industrial base.
“We know that our sanctions are an effective tool of economic pressure. And we will keep using them until Russia comes to the negotiation table with Ukraine for a just and lasting peace,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in a statement.
Given the importance of energy revenues to Russia’s war effort—Moscow still makes more than 500 million euros per day from fossil fuel sales—the package focuses on the energy sector. In a partial sop to Trump, the EU will accelerate slightly its phase-out of imports of Russian liquefied natural gas (Europe is the country’s biggest buyer) to the beginning of 2027 rather than the end of that year. One reason it is taking so long to phase out that gas is because gas contracts are long term; another more political reason is that the big buyers include France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, with much of that gas ending up in Germany. Those countries have more political heft in Brussels than smaller countries do.
The latest package also adds another 118 tankers to the designated list of so-called shadow tankers, unregistered vessels that illicitly carry Russian oil in contravention of Western limits on its sale. That is a necessary step, but it is insufficient without U.S. cooperation. Necessary because over the summer, Russia’s use of the shadow fleet to move oil has been creeping back up. Insufficient because EU and U.K. sanctions simply don’t have the reach or the bite that U.S. sanctions do.
Finally, von der Leyen said that the EU will go after buyers of Russian energy products, but she gave no specifics.
“We are now going after those who fuel Russia’s war by purchasing oil in breach of the sanctions. We target refineries, oil traders, petrochemical companies in third countries, including China,” von der Leyen said.
There were no indications that the European Union is prepared to apply the kind of secondary tariffs that Trump levied on India to dissuade it (unsuccessfully) off Russian oil.
The package also promises a ban on Russian banks and other financial institutions, including measures to target cryptocurrency workarounds used to avoid sanctions. It will also go after third-country suppliers of defense material that complement Russia’s expanded but stressed defense industrial base. Von der Leyen also said that the EU is working on a novel way to tap into, if not outright seize, the nearly $300 billion in frozen Russian Central Bank assets immobilized in the first days of the war.
The European Union was meant to present the sanctions package last week, but Trump demanded that EU and NATO members immediately cut off their purchases of Russian energy. He argued, not incorrectly, that European energy purchases, even if much smaller than they were before the war began, continue to fund the Kremlin’s war machine.
But the requests were so hard to meet—Hungary and Slovakia rely on Russian oil and gas shipped by pipeline, and also have friendly ties with the Kremlin, and NATO member Turkey buys loads of cheap Russian oil and gas—that most analysts saw the request as a stonewalling measure from Trump to defer any additional U.S. sanctions pressure. The U.S. Senate does have a very tough bill sanctioning Russia in hand, but that is held up indefinitely, at the White House’s request.
In any event, as with the previous 18 EU sanctions packages, the commission’s proposal must now get the unanimous approval of all 27 EU member states, including Hungary and Slovakia, which have held up nearly all previous sanctions rounds. This time, as before, the EU seems ready to just reach for the checkbook: Brussels is reportedly ready to free more than 500 million euros earmarked for Hungary to fast-track approval for the latest measures.
The post Europe Outlines New Sanctions on Russia appeared first on Foreign Policy.
