The Russian oil import embargo it has become the first great litmus test that the European Union must face in order to preserve its unity of action in the Ukrainian crisis. The difficulties in approving the sixth round of sanctions against Russia, which includes the aforementioned embargo, places the Twenty-seven before the problem that two countries, Hungary and Slovakia, are particularly harmed by the European goal of depriving Vladimir Putin of export earnings. The impossibility of the permanent representatives to reach a pre-agreement that would facilitate things for the European Council that began this Monday is eloquent of the risks that, in the present phase of stagnation of the war, the solidity with which the EU has faced the crisis so far wobbly.
Even the proposal that limits the embargo to the supply of oil by sea, but not to that which arrives by pipeline, has met with reluctance on the part of Viktor Orbán, as dependent on Russian crude as he is reluctant to bother Putin. Although the guarantee that if Russia cancels the supply the European partners will come to its aid may convince the governments of Hungary and Slovakia and even if they obtain some indirect benefit, the precedent of Germany and other states, which continue to receive Russian gasand Italy’s decision to bow to Moscow’s demand to pay for gas in rubles add too many cracks and exceptions to the European Commission’s attempts to propose increasingly compact and forceful sanctions packages.
The fact is that the prolongation of the war erodes the unanimity of the EU governments. Something predictable and that threatens to open one or several new gaps while the environment of the president Volodymyr Zelensky He does not miss an opportunity to remind himself that he is pursuing victory and calls on the West to multiply military aid, partly because such a demand is part of propaganda for domestic consumption, partly because some of the president’s advisers believe that victory is possible. Although no data allows us to glimpse that such a milestone is within their reach and, even less, that Putin and his generals are going to accept an outcome of the combats without territorial gains.
The exercise of ‘realpolitik’ by the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, when asked how much longer we will have to wait until the Ukrainian government considers what territorial concessions it is willing to accept, may seem like an excessively stark way of dealing with the facts, but it is necessary to stick to objective vectors. The war has distorted the economic recovery after the pandemic; The United States poses aid to Ukraine not only as a moral demand, but also as an indirect way of weakening Russia, forced to pay for a war as bloody as it is costly; and the Europeans, barring an unforeseeable outcome, will have to manage increasingly greater contradictions as the battle drags on, situations full of risks to save their internal cohesion. There is the discussion about the oil embargo to evaluate To what extent is it sustainable for Europeans to increase the cost induced by sanctions on Russia?. In the same way that it is inescapable for the Ukrainian regime to weigh (it is up to it, not any foreign dictates) what should be the limit of the heroic resistance of a society devastated by war, with millions of internally displaced persons and refugees abroad. The final size of the damage report depends on the answer to both questions.