Ukraine conflict leads EU to rid itself of Russian sacred cows
A bonfire of EU shibboleths on the economy, conflict, finance, energy supply, migration, and even the bloc’s future shape and size, has been lit by the conflict raging in Ukraine.
Battlefield images, the leadership of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who has framed the war as being between European democracy and brute bullying power, and the challenge of coordinating with UK and US allies who are pushing for more while having less to lose, has created a new political necessity.
The standard rational actor analysis of economic interests has gone by the wayside. And while during normal times, the EU’s deep economic ties with Russia had been a liability, with countries fearful of upsetting the Kremlin, those ties now offer leverage unmatched anywhere else in the world.
And the EU is going all in. By cutting off Russian banks from the Swift payments system, not only is the country’s industrial base losing access to foreign currency but Russian citizens’ individual credit card transactions are blocked.
Combined with freezing most of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves, the EU has made a political decision to force a deep recession on the Russian economy, with the hurt and pain that will be felt by Europeans as a result becoming a political irrelevance. Sacred cow No 1 slain.
But so much more has followed. The EU will ask states to grant asylum to Ukrainian refugees for up to three years, using a legal instrument that exists but which has never been triggered. Countries who have baulked at taking in refugees have opened up their borders. So much for sacred cow No 2.
This is no act of universal humanism, as those from Afghanistan and elsewhere who have been seeking to cross from Ukraine within the general population have
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