What will EU get for this?
To "impose a sanction" in this context is to apply a costly restriction to yourself, using the negative effect your self-restriction has on other parties to punish those parties, usually hoping that the negative effect is worse for them than it is for you. Any given trade happens because both parties want it; artificially making trade harder makes both parties worse off. The EU does not have to benefit from the intervention at all; they are apparently willing to pay that cost to make trade harder for Russia.
EU is not afraid of russians or nukes.
Well, to make it simple for you, EU gets a weak Russian military in the future, which is very desirable.
Edit: Oh, I see. I've replied to another 4 day old account. What a coincidence!
All of this taken together makes imposing heavy sanctions on Russia essentially inevitable. They are the only civilized response available, and not doing anything could have fatal consequences far beyond the EU. Governments across the world rightly realized now - unfortunately, too late - that the comparatively weak response to the 2014 annexation of Crimea has emboldened Putin to order a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. They will not repeat this mistake.
Edit: Looks like a consensus has been reached and Russia is about to get excluded from SWIFT.
> In the short term, sanctioning an action in a civilized manner that used to be a casus belli. In the long run, not allowing Russia to further modernize their military and likely preventing a nuclear war by not emboldening Putin to attack Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Finland or Poland at some point in the future because of previous inaction.
The EU nomenklatura gets to pat themselves on the back, and that's about it.
How will sanctions prevent Russia from "further moderniz[ing] their military"? They can probably get whatever tech they need from China now, if they were previously getting it from the West.
How will sanctions prevent "a nuclear war by not emboldening Putin to attack Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Finland or Poland at some point in the future because of previous inaction"? If Putin attacks another country, there won't be any more sanctions to enact, and these actions have demonstrated a fundamental unwillingness to engage militarily (e.g. Germany wouldn't even send Ukraine even small guns, so instead they promised * 5000 hats*, which they also apparently failed to deliver).
Modernizing a military is extremely expensive and Russia will not be able to afford it. This is crucial, given that Russia is waging aggressive wars within Europe.
IIRC, Russia gets most of its money from selling gas and oil. If Europe won't buy it, China will. I don't think this will really affect what the Russian government can afford.
No, there is doubt about it. There's a lot of bluster about the effectiveness of sanctions, but frankly, I'm skeptical. It sounds like politicians puffing up the actions they're willing to take.
I agree with that. Maybe I should have said that there is no other civilized response available than imposing heavy sanctions. Even a slightly weaker Russian military and some impact on Russian oligarchs may be better than nothing to prevent future misjudgments about the prospects of waging 19th Century territorial wars in the 21 Century.
That's kind of the problem, though. The catalog of "civilized responses" may not be up to the task of responding to these events, and being constrained to them prevents effective responses.
> Even a slightly weaker Russian military and some impact on Russian oligarchs may be better than nothing to prevent future misjudgments about the prospects of waging 19th Century territorial wars in the 21 Century.
Sometimes "better than nothing" rounds down to nothing. You might end up having more "19th Century territorial wars" because you let the war itself.
IMHO, the only thing right now that has a realistic chance of preventing another one of these wars from happening is a military failure by Russia. Right now that depends on the Ukrainian state acting on its own without much support from Europe.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-26/china-dis...