By Nina Bachkatov
A few hours before heading off for the summer break, EU ambassadors finally agreed on the 21st package of sanctions against Russia. The negotiations were difficult, reflecting an increasingly simple reality: after more than a decade of sanctions, new targets are becoming harder to find. But European policymakers remain convinced that sanctions are steadily eroding Russia’s capacity to wage war.
The first lists, adopted in 2014, were sometimes riddled with errors, including deceased individuals and confused patronymics. Today, Brussels relies on far more sophisticated intelligence and the net has widened dramatically, targeting relatives, subsidiaries, minority shareholders and companies supplying dual-use components. Yet after twenty-one packages, agreeing on fresh measures has become increasingly contentious. Many proposals originate in Ukraine—from ntelligence services, think tanks or lobbying networks—but translating them into legally robust and politically acceptable sanctions is becoming ever more difficult.
The first problem is timing. On the very day the EU agreed to keep the price cap on Russian oil exports to $44 a barrel, global oil prices climbed to $100. Such measures inevitably lose much of their intended impact when markets move faster than policymakers.
The second challenge is political cohesion. As one Irish official observed, sanctions should inflict more pain on Russia than on Europe itself. That is increasingly difficult, as the costs are unevenly distributed among member states. Because sanctions require unanimity, governments inevitably bargain to protect national interests. Greece fought to preserve shipments of Russian LNG from Yamal, most of which still supply France, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands. Bulgaria echoed Hungary’s opposition to visa restrictions on Patriarch Kirill. France and Italy secured a watered-down version of a Scandinavian and Baltic proposal to ban visas for all Russians involved in operations against Ukraine. Increasingly, Brussels relies on EU funds to persuade reluctant governments to support new sanctions. Even so, Bulgaria announced on 14 July that it would withdraw from the Coalition of the Willing, which coordinates military and financial support for Kyiv.
A third difficulty is geopolitical. The EU has done little to address accusations that it applies different standards to Ukraine and to the Middle East. Southern member states have argued for banning all imports from Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. They do not share the view, common in northern Europe, that Russia represents the principal threat to European security. Their strategic outlook extends across the Mediterranean as much as towards Eastern Europe.
The fourth problem is institutional. The EU remains a slow-moving political machine struggling to adapt to a rapidly changing world. In 2014, and again in 2022, sanctions were one of the few instruments available against a Kremlin unwilling to negotiate. Few expected the war to last this long, Donald Trump to upend the transatlantic relationship, climate change to impose mounting economic costs on Europe itself, or conflicts in the Middle East to reshape global energy markets. The strategic environment has evolved far faster than the sanctions regime.
The fifth point is now quietly acknowledged. Crippling the Russian economy and forcing Vladimir Putin from power was always an extraordinarily ambitious objective. Russia is not Cuba. It is a resource superpower whose commodities remain indispensable to much of the world. Since the first sanctions in 2014, Moscow has built alternative financial channels, trading networks and logistical routes. Secondary sanctions have complicated these arrangements, but they also risk unintended consequences. Natural-resource flows cannot simply be redirected by political decree. At a time when President Trump’s tariff policies are disrupting global trade and conflicts in the Gulf threaten maritime routes through the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb, even Russia’s so-called shadow fleet can appear a comparatively reliable supplier.
The sixth element is that sanctions regime has also paid insufficient attention to the wider consequences of military operations against Russia’s infrastructure. Across the Caucasus and Central Asia, Russia remains an essential economic partner. Repeated attacks on refineries, ports and pipelines affect not only Russian exports but also the economies that depend on them. Disruptions along the Caspian Pipeline Consortium route or at the port of Novorossiysk have repercussions well beyond Russia. Kazakhstan officials, for example, fear that interruptions to Russian refining capacity and fuel shortages will encourage illegal exports of subsidised Kazakh petrol across the border. The ripple effects now extend across Central Asia and even into Afghanistan.
A seventh dimension is about Russia’s Putin itself. Russia’s international appeal remains limited, even among its formal allies. Yet beyond Europe, Moscow continues to be viewed as an indispensable counterweight to a world dominated by Washington. That calculation extends well beyond China to a wide range of middle powers across Asia, Africa and Latin America. Few doubt that the invasion has weakened the Russian economy for years to come, and that two decades of painstaking diplomacy have largely been squandered. Yet the central political objective has not been achieved. Russia is isolated from the West but not from the world. Vladimir Putin has neither abandoned the war nor accepted negotiations on terms acceptable to Kyiv and its European partners. Nor can the West claim victory after committing hundreds of billions of euros in military and financial assistance.
Finally, as the limits of economic pressure become more apparent, politics inevitably reasserts itself. That is now visible in Kyiv. The recent demonstrations were not another Maidan. Protesters were not calling for regime change but objecting to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s dismissal of Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov as part of a broader government reshuffle. In wartime, it was striking that the president himself acknowledged that the two men had ceased speaking to one another. Zelensky ultimately had to respond to public pressure by also replacing Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi.
The reshuffle may mark the emergence of a younger generation of officials—less shaped by the Soviet legacy and more comfortable with artificial intelligence and new technologies, particularly for targeting operations inside Russia and in occupied territories. It also demonstrates that Ukraine retains an active civil society despite the pressures of war. But it also reveals Zelensky’s new political vulnerability. As decision-making has become increasingly decentralised—on the battlefield, in defence procurement and in mobilisation—competition for influence has intensified. Behind the personnel changes lies one of Ukraine’s most sensitive questions: control over defence procurement and the distribution of wartime resources. The golden touch seems to have deserted the president.
The next test will come at the end of the 40-day campaign launched on 26 June, when Zelensky instructed Ukraine’s security services to conduct operations intended to force Russia to end the war. The immediate result was a sharp escalation. Kyiv and big cities suffered under heavy bombing. Ukrainian drones struck Russian energy infrastructure and logistics centres, including warehouses. A month later, on 26 July, Zelensky publicly welcomed strikes in the Caspian Sea against what he described as internationally sanctioned cargoes transporting military equipment between Iran and Russia.
The significance of those operations extends beyond the battlefield. They increasingly intersect with the wider confrontation between Israel and Iran and with the strategic calculations of the United States. Against that backdrop, Zelensky announced he will attend the funeral of Senator Lindsey Graham and to hold talks with President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Ukraine and Israel already maintain a strategic dialogue covering cybersecurity and defence industries.
The danger is not that the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East become formally linked. It is that they gradually merge into a single geopolitical confrontation in which military, economic and diplomatic theatres increasingly overlap. Such a development would compel many of the world’s reluctant powers to choose sides at precisely the moment when international diplomacy is at its weakest.