The most frustrating aspect of the Kremlin’s current escalation in and around Ukraine is the rationality of its actions and the simplicity of the situation. The European Union has the economic means to stop Vladimir Putin. Russia’s economy and budget are dependent on income from Russian energy exports to the EU.
However, the EU will not use this leverage. This is in spite of the fact that the collective costs of doing so may not be that high anymore. The rise of liquified natural gas, rapidly increasing use of renewables, drafting of contingency plans, and other factors have, over the last years, made the union more resilient, independent, and flexible.
To be sure, at one point during the conflict, the EU did impose moderately serious and today still fully valid sectoral sanctions in late July 2014. Yet, that has not been primarily a response to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Instead, it was – as the peculiar timing and sudden resoluteness of the union’s decision indicated – a punishment for Moscow’s killing of more than 200 EU citizens. The mainly Dutch West Europeans made up most of the passengers of the MH-17 flight which was accidentally shot down by a Russian missile over Ukraine, on July 17, 2014.
As long as Russia, during the current escalation, does not kill many EU citizens, as it did in 2014, the EU will not get its act together. The union’s representatives may go into rhetorical and diplomatic overdrive. But Brussels will not – such is the lesson from the Russian-Ukrainian, Russian-Georgian, and similar wars – impose any serious sectoral sanctions against Moscow.
Putin & Co. know this. That is why they are escalating. The economic costs of war are low. The political gains for Putin’s regime from a victorious war against Ukraine would be high. The current escalation and even more so a possible war distracts the electorate from Russia’s many domestic problems, before the State Duma elections in September 2021. At least in the view of some people in Moscow, it would be irrational for the Kremlin to not escalate further, and, if need be, to also go to a full-scale and open inter-state war.
Andreas Umland is a research fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs in Stockholm and senior expert at the Ukrainian Institute for the Future in Kyiv.
