Jonah Redfern Brussels is preparing to give up the format that has defined its economic pressure on Moscow since 2022: the single, sprawling sanctions package negotiated all at once. According to the Financial Times, as reported by The New Voice of Ukraine, EU officials are weighing a shift to smaller, targeted tranches, explicitly to blunt the leverage a single member state gains by threatening the whole.
Our earlier coverage showed how that leverage plays out: the 21st package became law only after Greece extracted concessions, with proposed restrictions on Russian LNG and on tourism among the measures cut from the final text. The FT frames that outcome as the trigger for what one report calls a potentially dramatic change of method, per RBC-Ukraine — the objective stays, the delivery changes.
Why 'veto-proof' is the wrong term
EU sanctions are formally 'restrictive measures.' The core act is a Council decision under Article 29 of the Treaty on European Union, part of the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), and it requires unanimity — the agreement of all 27 governments. A parallel regulation under Article 215 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU then makes the measures directly binding on companies and individuals. Crucially, existing measures must also be renewed, generally every six months, and that renewal needs unanimity too.
Splitting one package into several does not touch that rule. Each tranche still needs all 27. So a genuinely veto-proof sanction, in the treaty sense, is not on offer here unless measures are moved onto a different legal base that permits qualified-majority voting — something the reporting does not describe. What smaller tranches change is not the vote threshold but the bargaining table.
Hypothesis: unbundling weakens holdout states by denying them a large package to hold hostage. Supporting this: when twenty-odd measures travel together, one capital can trade its consent on the whole bundle for concessions on the single item it cares about, as the Greek episode illustrates; a narrow tranche offers far less to trade against. Against this: unanimity still binds every tranche, so a determined government can still block any single measure it dislikes — and more numerous votes mean more occasions to say no, not fewer. Whether the pivot sharpens or dilutes pressure depends on which effect dominates.
What this means if you are…
- a national government seeking concessions: your leverage narrows to the specific tranche in front of you, not the EU's entire Russia policy.
- in Kyiv or an allied capital wanting faster pressure: narrow tranches can be adopted more quickly and more often, but each remains exposed to a single veto.
- a business tracking listings: expect more numerous legal acts rather than one annual set-piece — compliance monitoring becomes continuous rather than episodic.
Timeline and open questions
The FT reporting describes a direction of travel, not an adopted decision; no new legal act has been published on this basis. The open questions are concrete: will Brussels keep sanctions wholly within the unanimity-bound CFSP framework, or try to route parts through legal bases that allow qualified-majority voting? And does breaking packages up actually speed adoption, or simply multiply the vetoes to be managed?
What to watch next: the first package floated under the new approach and how it is numbered; whether the dropped LNG and tourism measures reappear as a standalone tranche; and any sign that the European Commission is testing non-CFSP legal bases to escape unanimity altogether.
