Greece stalls LNG sanctions

Greece stopped the EU's 21st Russia sanctions package on 17 July because of 27 ships.

Athens would not accept a ban on European vessels carrying Russian liquefied natural gas to customers in Asia and elsewhere (Euronews, Topontiki/Reuters). That was enough. EU foreign-policy sanctions need unanimous approval, so one capital can hold up the lot. Ambassadors moved the vote to 23 July.

The delay is not the real story. The mechanism is. Europe wants to squeeze Russia, but it has to do so through businesses with contracts, vessels, insurance cover and lenders. Any government with an exposed national industry can turn agreement into a negotiation.

How sanctions became a shipping fight

Russia sanctions no longer mean only banning goods. Increasingly, they target the services that make trade work: transport, insurance, financing and payments. Remove those, and cargoes become harder and more expensive to move.

Greece's objection sits exactly there. Athens is not defending Russian gas imports into Europe. It is defending the right of Greek-owned ships to carry Russian LNG from Arctic terminals to buyers outside the EU.

The exposure is unusually concentrated. Dynagas, controlled by Greek shipowner George Prokopiou, operates 27 LNG carriers and has moved more than 10 million tonnes of Russian LNG across 144 voyages since early 2025, according to FT/Kpler tracking data (Dedomeno/FT, Interfax).

Athens says a ban on EU operators would not stop Russian exports. It would simply hand the business to non-European carriers (ProtoThema/Reuters). These are specialised Arctic ice-class vessels, not ordinary ships that can be moved easily to other routes. If they are banned from Russian work, their owners are likely to sell them to non-Western operators, leaving Europe with neither the leverage nor the business.

The case against Greece is also practical. If EU-regulated carriers remain available, Russia's shipping costs stay lower. Push those cargoes onto a shadow fleet, meaning older vessels with opaque ownership, flags from looser jurisdictions and insurance outside the Western system, and Russia pays more in freight and cover. That should eat into export revenue (Maritime Executive, The Insider).

The problem is that neither side has published the cargo-by-cargo data needed to show how much revenue Moscow would actually lose. The mechanism makes sense. The scale is still guesswork.

Every exposed firm creates a veto

Greece is the loudest holdout, but it is not the only government bargaining.

Austria sought a narrow exception for Raiffeisen Bank International, whose Russian subsidiary has been hit with more than €2.3 billion in damages by Russian courts. The dispute is linked to a frozen stake in construction group Strabag and the sanctioned entity Rasperia (trend). Vienna wanted the frozen stake transferred in a way that would compensate RBI, with the arrangement written directly into the sanctions text (FAZ).

Belgium has the same problem on a far larger scale. Euroclear, the Brussels-based financial depository that settles cross-border securities transactions, holds roughly €190 billion in frozen Russian central-bank assets (Meduza, EJIL:Talk!). The EU sends the profits from those assets to Ukraine, but has not confiscated the principal.

Brussels accepts the current arrangement, but it is wary of going further without legal protection. Moscow's courts keep producing politically driven judgments against Euroclear. They may be unenforceable in practice, but they still create risk for a Belgian-based company at the centre of Europe's financial plumbing.

The pattern is the same in each case. Sanctions place real financial risk inside named European firms. Unanimity then gives those firms' governments the power to bargain.

The asking price rises

Poland and the Baltic states see this as a weakening of the sanctions system. Every diluted round teaches the next exposed sector how to lobby its capital before the next vote (Business Insider Polska).

Sanctions work as a stack. Oil price caps, transport bans, insurance restrictions, SWIFT cutoffs and asset freezes reinforce each other (Commission FAQ). Loosen one layer, and the others become easier to work around.

The 21st package may still pass on 23 July. But four years into the war, the cost of unanimity is becoming harder to ignore. Governments are not blocking sanctions because they support Russia. They are extracting cover for the private losses sanctions create at home.

The ambition is collective. The bill arrives at individual addresses.