Next week, Ukraine will urge the EU to implement tough new sanctions against Russia. After US President Donald Trump announced on Monday that he would not impose fresh penalties on Moscow for fear of endangering progress towards a ceasefire, Kyiv has clearly decided that its best hopes of maintaining economic pressure on the Kremlin lie with Europe.

However, those hopes are likely to be dashed. For one thing, Ukraine’s ambitions are significantly higher than anything Europe will realistically be willing to implement. A Ukrainian white paper that will be presented to the EU calls for aggressive actions including “the introduction of secondary sanctions on purchasers of Russian oil”. These are likely to include India and China, a move that Europe has been — and remains — reluctant to make, for fear of damaging diplomatic and economic relations with those emerging superpowers.

Even if Kyiv can persuade Europe to establish new penalties, actually getting the continent to change its own behaviour is another matter altogether. Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kestutis Budrys this week suggested that the EU could intensify efforts to hit Moscow’s energy exports, adding: “We should stop the major income to Russia’s budget and major income to their war machine. This is the exports of gas, oil, LNG (liquefied natural gas). We have to stop those.”

However, Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium are importing more LNG than they were a year ago. In the third year of the war the continent spent more on purchases of Russian fossil fuels than it did on financial aid to Ukraine, and only achieved a 1% year-on-year reduction in volume.

Besides, there is the elephant in the room — namely, that the US has left the room. Any measures implemented without US participation will prove toothless. Secondary sanctions against India or China would need the threat of American implementation to truly wean those countries off Russian energy supplies. Similarly, the EU has discussed reducing the oil price cap for Russian oil, yet US cooperation would be necessary for it to be globally enforced.

Turning away from technical issues, it is understandable that — faced with American wavering on sanctions — the Ukrainians would work more intensively with the allies they have. However, this strategy benefits Vladimir Putin more than it does Kyiv, setting up a two-track process which widens the gulf between the US and Europe on Ukraine and in turn weakens Nato unity.

One measure favoured by Ukraine is for the EU to use more majority-rules decision-making regarding sanctions to stop individual members standing in the way — a move clearly directed at Hungarian Prime Minister and perennial blocker Viktor Orbán. While such a move may speed up the EU’s internal processes, it may also ratchet up the organisation’s internal tensions.

Underlying all of this is the uncomfortable truth that Russia has now survived 17 packages of EU sanctions. While it is often said that sanctions are intended to slow down Russia’s war machine and not grind it to a halt completely, that war machine is not only ticking over but advancing forwards into Ukrainian territory. Back in January, former Russian Central Bank official Alexandra Prokopenko predicted that the economy would avoid any crisis for at least another year, noting that Putin was not yet “desperate”.

So what can Ukraine do to keep up pressure on Russia? It must focus on supporting US Senator Lindsey Graham, who is currently trying to push through a bill implementing harsh measures on Moscow. And, given the weight of the US within the global economic system, it must also concentrate on getting Trump onside. The alternative — turning its attention to a small and divided Europe — will lead to Ukraine, not Russia, being penalised.

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