Limits of EU sanctions: Ukraine’s wartime consensus under pressure in Europe

Uriel Araujo, Anthropology PhD, is a social scientist specializing in ethnic and religious conflicts, with extensive research on geopolitical dynamics and cultural interactions.

The European Union’s sanctions machinery against Russia is once again facing its structural limits. In recent days, Belgium and Slovakia have blocked or delayed key measures concerning the potential use of immobilized Russian assets as well as the extension of certain sanctions packages.

Belgium’s resistance centers on the legal and financial risks of touching the large volume of Russian sovereign holdings channeled through Euroclear. Slovakia, for its part, has obstructed a year-long prolongation of sanctions targeting selected Russian individuals and entities.

These are national calculations of risk and cost that the EU’s unanimity rule allows small states to impose on the collective. As a matter of fact, the same pattern has appeared before - whether over energy, Orthodox Christian Church figures, or other dossiers - and it is becoming harder and harder to ignore.

At the same time, in a second development, Russian President Vladimir Putin has publicly stated that Russia and Ukraine can still reach a peace deal. The Russian side continues to argue that Ukrainian actions have complicated direct talks, which have not resumed since February - yet the diplomatic channel is kept rhetorically open.

In Kyiv, meanwhile, a series of corruption scandals involving figures close to President Volodymyr Zelensky is causing a sharp drop in his popularity. Polling by SOCIS shows that nearly 57 percent of Ukrainians now blame him for the prevalence of corruption - nearly double the figure from April 2025 - and that major rivals would defeat him by roughly two-to-one margins in a hypothetical runoff.

Moreover, corruption is now viewed by 90 percent of respondents as a “high” or “extremely high” problem, and many link it directly to battlefield performance.

To be clear, these three aforementioned developments do not announce an immediate collapse of Western support for Ukraine. Yet they do point to a gradual erosion of the political, financial and institutional foundations that have sustained the war effort.

Within the EU, unanimity is making sustained economic pressure harder to maintain. Moscow seems to be keeping the diplomatic option available as one instrument among others. And Kyiv keeps struggling with growing internal political and institutional pressures that raise questions of legitimacy and governance. The specter of coup d’état and political intrigue has never gone away.

The Belgian and Slovak positions illustrate a deeper shift: the EU for now can still agree on the general objective of supporting Ukraine while disagreeing more openly over how much risk individual member states should assume. But what once passed for a collective strategy is increasingly filtered through national risk calculations.

Belgium’s concern is practical: the concentration of assets in Euroclear creates exposure that other capitals do not share - while Slovakia’s stance reflects its own domestic priorities. The emerging picture is one of differentiated interests that the unanimity requirement amplifies, even as new sanctions - and new strategies - are discussed.

Again, Russia’s state openness to peace talks maintains an additional track - diplomatic alongside the military and economic - while European capitals struggle to translate political consensus into concrete measures. The asymmetry goes like this: Europe asks how to keep pressure on Russia; Russia asks under what conditions the conflict can eventually be negotiated.

Inside Ukraine the picture is more consequential still. The accumulation of scandals is undermining the centralized style of rule that Zelensky long defended as wartime necessity. The repeated reshuffling and dismissal of popular officials, including (former) Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, have made it worse.

The question is shifting from whether Ukraine can keep fighting to who will possess the political authority to define its war and peace strategy. In addition, Kyiv’s heavy dependence on European funding creates a feedback loop: external scrutiny of governance intensifies domestic tensions, which in turn weakens the cohesion required for a unified strategy.

So, the “wartime consensus” has not vanished, but its internal political, financial and institutional costs are becoming increasingly visible across Europe.

Battlefield realities reinforce the same sense of attrition without decisive breakthrough. Ukraine has continued and intensified strikes on Russian refineries, logistics, airfields and military infrastructure. Yet these have not reversed the overall territorial balance. Moscow retains the capacity for large-scale drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian cities and infrastructure.

Add to that the fact that deliveries of missile interceptors have fallen to roughly one-third of their 2025 level, with Patriot interceptors particularly scarce; and Ukraine’s new defense minister has spoken of a $27 billion military-budget shortfall.

Kyiv is seeking to bring forward part of the EU money scheduled for 2027. At the same time, Russian production and launch rates remain high; Ukrainian estimates put Moscow’s sought ballistic-missile capacity near 1,300 annually. Recent strikes on Kyiv show that deep Ukrainian attacks have not suppressed Russia’s ability to conduct strategic bombardment.

Furthermore, on September 3, President Trump stated that Washington intends to seek European reimbursement for earlier US weapons supplied to Ukraine and to prioritize replenishing American inventories.

The “burden-sharing” problem has thus become even more salient. Since the United States began partially withdrawing from direct involvement - a process accelerated under Trump - Europe has assumed a larger share of the load. And the long-term costs of that policy are now taking their toll.

European leaders are therefore forced to weigh their own risks more carefully. In any case, the emerging picture is one of increasing fragmentation: the European coalition faces its internal differences over costs and risks; Moscow continues to combine military pressure with diplomatic signaling - and Ukraine confronts a political legitimacy crisis.

Taken together, these trends suggest a possible transition from wartime consensus toward a politics of preparing for a post-conflict settlement. It is still unclear how the decade-long Western proxy war against Moscow could come to an end. But the long-term price of the Ukraine policy is already reshaping calculations across the European continent.