The European Union adopted its 20th sanctions package against Russia in April. The announcement from Brussels was confident. The language was familiar: resolve, pressure, commitment, unity.
What followed was less familiar.
Within 24 hours, China placed seven European entities on its export control list — a move widely interpreted as a direct response to the EU’s latest sanctions package. European industry is currently running an ambitious rearmament programme. That programme depends on Chinese rare earth elements and critical mineral inputs. The sequence of events was uncomfortable enough that most European capitals chose not to comment on it directly.
This is becoming a pattern.
Each successive sanctions package is presented as a demonstration of European strategic coherence. Each one also reveals, with increasing clarity, the gap between what Brussels announces and what European economies can actually sustain.
The 20th package is a case in point. It was adopted only after Hungary and Slovakia lifted their vetoes — vetoes that collapsed when Ukraine restarted oil transit through the Druzhba pipeline on April 22. The mechanism that finally unlocked European unity on sanctions was the continuation of Russian energy flows. Four years into a stated policy of energy decoupling, the package designed to apply maximum pressure on Moscow became possible only because Moscow’s oil kept flowing westward.
This is not a minor inconsistency. It is a precise illustration of where European energy policy actually stands — not where it is described as standing.
Diversification has happened. Dependence has not been eliminated. It has been redistributed and, in many cases, made more expensive. Alternative supply chains cost more, carry greater logistical complexity, and in several cases depend on partners whose reliability over the long term remains untested. European households and energy-intensive industries have absorbed these costs steadily and without much acknowledgment from the institutions that generated them.
The extension of sanctions to Chinese entities follows the same logic of ambition outpacing analysis. By listing Chinese firms accused of facilitating sanctions circumvention, the EU has moved its regulatory reach into territory where European exposure is significant and where the capacity to absorb retaliation is limited. This is not a reason to abandon enforcement. It is a reason to account honestly for the consequences — something the current framework does not fully account for.
The broader strategic context makes the problem more acute. The transatlantic relationship remains central to European security. But it is operating under different conditions than when the current sanctions architecture was designed. Washington is more openly transactional. The assumption that strategic alignment provides a stable external anchor for European policy no longer holds in the way it once did. European policymakers are adjusting to this reality slowly, and often only when forced to.
The result is a policy that was designed for one environment and is being executed in another — without adequate revision and without honest accounting of the costs being passed on to European economies and citizens.
None of this argues for abandoning sanctions or weakening Europe’s strategic position. It argues for something more demanding: A rigorous assessment of what each successive package actually costs, what it actually achieves, and whether the gap between those two things is narrowing or widening.
Four years and twenty packages in, that assessment is overdue.
Europe retains real strengths — a large internal market, advanced industrial capacity, institutional depth. But strengths are not self-sustaining. They erode when policy consistently outruns the economic foundations that support it.
The 20th package was presented as evidence of European resolve.
The bill for that resolve is still being calculated. And Brussels has yet fully to confront it.
EU industrial policy fails, so European prime ministers go to China