Kaja Kallas said the European Union will seek tougher sanctions on Russia this autumn, and the machinery of continental power is already lining up to do what it does best: punish, freeze, and centralise decisions over people’s lives. In an interview with German newspaper Die Welt, the EU's foreign policy chief said she would "put forward the most far-reaching sanctions listings since the start of the war," with the total number of sanctioned Russian companies and individuals set to rise "by a third."
Brussels Tightens the Screws
Kallas said: "The pressure must keep growing until Moscow ends its war." That line tells you everything about how the Brussels apparatus sees the world. Pressure, listings, escalation. The language is bureaucratic, the effect is material. Since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion against Ukraine in 2022, the EU has approved 21 packages of sanctions targeting Russian political and military leaders, businessmen, oligarchs and companies. More than 3,000 individuals and entities have been sanctioned so far, and more than €28 billion in private assets in the EU have been frozen.
The next round could target a further 1,000 individuals and entities, Kallas said. The sanctions also aim to restrict Moscow's ability to fund and sustain its operations in Ukraine by targeting its military complex, industrial base and export operations. This is the state system at work across borders: not just armies and flags, but financial choke points, asset freezes, and the administrative power to decide who gets cut off from property and movement.
Unanimity, Vetoes, and National Interest
Any listing must secure the unanimous approval of all 27 EU member states. So much for the smooth, technocratic myth of European unity. The sanctions regime depends on every capital signing off, and recent attempts to broaden EU sanctions on Russia have met resistance from some member states. The most recent, 21st package of sanctions on Russia was almost derailed by Greece, which insisted on a special exemption from an EU-wide ban on the shipment of Russian liquefied natural gas as a precondition to approving the sanctions.
Athens ultimately secured the exemption despite other diplomats' outrage. That detail matters. The same institutions that lecture the continent about common purpose and strategic discipline still bend when a member state’s economic interests are on the line. The result is not principle, but bargaining among governments, each protecting its own commercial slice of the order while presenting the whole arrangement as collective resolve.
Kallas' comments also suggest the upcoming sanctions could become another test of that unanimity rule, with national governments once again deciding how far the EU can go in its campaign against Russia. The structure is familiar. Brussels proposes. Capitals haggle. Ordinary people live with the consequences.
War, Markets, and the Atlantic Alignment
Kallas also said she was optimistic that the US and the EU could "move closer" in their sanctions policy after a Russia sanctions bill championed by the late senator Lindsey Graham was passed in the senate in a bipartisan vote. The transatlantic message is plain enough. Washington and Brussels are not separate moral actors but linked managers of coercive power, coordinating economic warfare while calling it policy.
There has been mounting anxiety in Brussels over the eroding of financial support to Ukraine and sanctions against Russia since Donald Trump's re-election. That anxiety says less about peace than about the stability of the political and financial arrangements that keep the war machine moving. When support wobbles, the institutions panic. When sanctions bite unevenly, they reach for more sanctions.
The EU likes to present this as resolve. It looks more like a continental bureaucracy expanding its reach through asset freezes, blacklists, and unanimous votes in closed rooms. The people named on those lists don't get a hearing from the grand European project. They get cut off. The rest of us get the lecture.