Two years of packages, and what the list looks like now

A further European sanctions package was adopted around the second anniversary of the full-scale invasion, and its content reflected where the problem had moved.

What was targeted

Individuals and entities involved in supplying components, particularly for drones, including companies registered outside russia. That last category is the significant one: sanctioning a firm in a third country is diplomatically harder than sanctioning a russian one, and it had become necessary because the supply routes ran that way.

Further military-industrial listings, additional export restrictions, and continued tightening of the mechanisms against re-export.

The record read as a whole

Thirteen packages in two years, each requiring unanimity among twenty-seven member states with different energy exposures, different trade relationships and different domestic politics.

The forecast in early 2022 was that this consensus would fracture within a year. It did not. Individual packages were delayed, narrowed and negotiated hard, which is what unanimity looks like in practice, but none failed.

What I would say to the sceptics

The measure of a sanctions regime is not whether the target economy collapses; that was never the design. It is whether it becomes structurally more expensive to prosecute a war — more intermediaries, worse terms, older components, longer routes.

By that measure the record after two years is substantial, and the political fact underneath it — that twenty-seven governments kept agreeing — is the more remarkable half.