This Will End Putin
How Recent Sanctions Promise to Finally Undermine Putin
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Everyone has been talking about the sixth sanctions package against Putin. The initial proposed package against Russia was blocked on May 18 and was rife with controversy until May 30 when it was finally approved.
In its entirety, the sixth sanctions package is meant to de-swift further banks, single out Russian disinformation actors, and slowly eradicate the EU’s reliance on Russian oil imports.
The proposed plan was to end the EU’s reliance on Russian coal by August, which it primarily exports to China. But doing the same for oil would be more difficult for a number of EU members that are more reliant on it, including Slovakia, Hungary, and Czechia. That is why a compromise has been reached where by the end of 2022, 90% of Russia’s previous oil imports will be canceled.
That is much more than Russia — and Putin — can handle.
The previous unanimous EU support of sanctions against Russia with five swift sanctions packages has now been undermined with some disagreement over how the sixth sanction package will have uneven economic repercussions on certain European Union Member States.
The Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, himself pointed out that the fifth sanctions package was approved on the 44th day of the war; and it took another fifty days or so to approve the sixth package, calling it “unacceptable.”
But, finally, it was passed. And that’s a really good thing.
We should keep in mind that this much (near-total) unanimous support for sanctions is revolutionary. We would be hard-pressed to find a similarly unifying issue (perhaps 9/11) where most agree on a pressing issue.
The Package to End Them All
The reason the sixth package of sanctions was proposed is because of the extent to which Russian gas exports to the EU funded their war effort, despite the many sanctions issued against it.
According to the Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), the EU has daily transferred $730 million, which is roughly four times as much as Russia’s daily military spending.
