Europe Prepares Tough Sanctions Against Russia

Meh.

I'm pretty skeptical about any talk of European sanctions against Russia.

But here's Der Spiegel, "The Wake-Up Call: Europe Toughens Stance against Putin":

It took the shooting down of a Boeing jet carrying almost 300 people before the EU agreed on the first true economic sanctions against Russia. The Americans want further action, but it is impossible to know if punitive measures can sway Vladimir Putin.

It was the images. Absurdly tattooed pro-Russian fighters, cigarettes dangling from their lips and Kalashnikovs tucked under their arms, stomping around in the field of bodies and wreckage at the crash site, as if the dead children from the downed Boeing had nothing to do with them. Experts holding their noses as they opened a railroad car full of dead bodies. A seemingly endless convoy of hearses leaving Eindhoven Airport in the Netherlands. And Russian President Vladimir Putin took it all in without losing his composure.

It's usually the images.
It's part of the occasionally cynical business of political experts to refer to a tragedy of this magnitude, and to the endlessly repeated TV images of the suffering of innocent people, as a "game changer." It's the moment that divides the course of a crisis into "before" and "after" -- a time when the public and politicians hold their breaths and take a new look at the situation. But one of the unique features of the European Union is that in the "after" period, it often continues for a time to behave the way it did in the "before" period. Supporting evidence was provided by an exchange from last Tuesday, almost a week after Malaysian Airlines flight MH 17 was shot down:

Let's at least do an arms embargo, argued British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond.

No, you can't even do financial sanctions, responded his French counterpart Laurent Fabius in the hearing room of the European Council building in Brussels.

Prior to the meeting, EU foreign ministers had seemed deeply disconcerted. But behind closed doors, the overriding objective was apparently not to determine how best to force Putin to back down, but how best to protect their own domestic economies...

More.