“Russia doesn’t want peace, everyone else does.” That’s the message from the EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas, as the seventeenth sanctions package is unveiled, with another already in the works. The statement is meant to be definitive, a moral verdict on the war in Ukraine. Russia, the aggressor, stands alone in its appetite for conflict. Europe, by contrast, responds with righteous restraint, choosing economic penalties over military escalation. But the reality is far more complicated, and Kallas’s words sound less like a reflection of truth than a justification of policy inertia.
Seventeen rounds of sanctions. Seventeen carefully coordinated layers of economic pressure. Each announced with the same promise, that this time, the pain will bite, that this time, Moscow will feel compelled to change course. And yet, the war grinds on. If sanctions were a strategy with a clear exit, a defined objective, or a measurable effect, perhaps they would mean more. But as they pile up, with new ones queued like products on a conveyor belt, they begin to resemble not diplomacy, but ritual. A performance of intent, rather than a path to peace.
Nothing says “we want peace” like the relentless rollout of punishments with no accompanying offer, no negotiation track, no diplomatic horizon. Sanctions, in theory, are a tool to avoid war. But when deployed indefinitely, with no political solution in sight, they become their own form of warfare, slower, less visible, but war nonetheless. And maybe that’s the point: to signal moral superiority while avoiding harder choices.
If everyone else wants peace, as Kallas claims, someone will have to show what peace might actually look like. Right now, all we see is more packages.
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