Opinion

Putin’s best EU friends

The Russian leader rounds up the EU’s ‘Putinistas’ to bring an end to the sanctions.

Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is trying to have it both ways.

Just days after attending the G7 summit, which highlighted the possibility of stepping up sanctions against Russia should it not meet the commitments it made in the Minsk agreements, Renzi hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin in Milan, where he spoke of the “traditional Italian-Russian friendship.”

Alluding to the eventual end of EU sanctions on Russia, Putin offered “to reciprocate and go further in expanding our co-operation.” 

We won’t have to wait long to find out whether his rhetoric worked. The current sanctions regime imposed on Russia by the European Union is due to expire at the end of July. To extend it, or to increase the pressure, a unanimous decision from all 28 member states is required.

Even without Italy, there are a number of weak links. One of them is Greece, where Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras consulted Putin extensively on the phone before making his address to Parliament on June 5, in which he scolded the diktat of the Troika. Russia’s Gazprom recently reached an agreement with Turkey to build a new pipeline to Europe, Turkish Stream, and Moscow has been trying to woo Greek leaders into signing up for the scheme. In Putin’s words, the deal will offer Greece “hundreds of millions of euros every year.” An agreement would likely involve a large advance payment that would somewhat improve the sorry state of Greece’s public finances.

Further north, Putin may hope for the backing of two Central European countries also tempted by Russian money: Hungary and Slovakia.

Last year, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán compared sanctions against Russia to “shooting oneself in the foot.” In the midst of the crisis in Ukraine, Orbán was willing to sign, without going through a competitive public tender first, a secret €12-billion nuclear deal with Rosatom. Euratom Supply Agency, which oversees the supply of nuclear fuels to EU users, refused to co-sign the fuel supply contract for the Paks power plant. It was reported to have been backed in this decision by the European Commission, a claim that the Hungarian government and Rosatom vehemently deny. The deal is also under scrutiny on state aid and competition grounds.

Robert Fico — the prime minister of Slovakia who previously called the sanctions “meaningless” — recently made two trips to Moscow in less than a month. Comparing the sanctions against Russia to the U.S. embargo on Cuba, he noted that the volume of Slovak-Russian trade fell by 40 percent in the first quarter of 2015, adding that he saw “absolutely no reason” for that figure to deteriorate further.

Neither of the two small post-communist countries is likely to act alone in order to block the extension of sanctions. So far, both Slovakia and Hungary — like Renzi — have been trying to have it both ways, giving a lukewarm approval to the EU’s consensus position on sanctions, and then complaining about it bitterly at home, and in Moscow.

The situation is fragile and can only change for the worse. A shared understanding that a critical mass of EU members, including relatively large and influential countries, oppose the sanctions can tip the balance in favor of Europe’s “Putinistas.” That, of course, would be a disaster. The removal of sanctions after only one year would send a clear signal to Putin that aggression pays off. This would spell more trouble for Ukraine — and likely for other countries in the neighborhood, including Moldova or the Baltic states.

Past weeks have brought reports of increased Russian military activity in eastern Ukraine. The town of Shchastya and Stanytsia Luhanska, outside of Luhansk, have been shelled, for example, and fighting has intensified in the vicinity of the Donetsk airport. Under these circumstances, the only appropriate conversation to have is about strengthening the existing sanctions regime. We need to think about including family members of the ruling Russian clique on visa ban lists, and making it more difficult for Russian oligarchs to launder their funds in Western Europe and the UK.

Alas, with Putin’s fifth column in the EU, that discussion is unlikely to take place anytime soon. The decision on whether or not to extend the sanctions in their present form will be a crucial test of Europe’s resolve to become an effective provider of common security. Not only would the EU’s failure to respond to Russia’s aggression be a victory for Putin, it would also bode ill for any ambitions to build a well-functioning political union on the continent. 

Dalibor Rohac is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC. He tweets at @daliborrohac. 

This article has been corrected to clarify that Euratom Supply Agency, not the EU’s nuclear energy authority, refused to approve Hungary’s nuclear agreement with Rosatom.