How exactly can EU sanctions against a few Chinese companies bring peace in Ukraine?

That the US and the EU are close allies is not news. Nor that they more than frequently align their agenda when it comes to China. Last week was another occasion of parroting, this time with the EU shooting first.

Last Wednesday the EU issued its 13th package of sanctions against Russia after two years of its war of aggression against Ukraine, with the previous 12 not being too successful though. For the main reason is that the war lingers still and much of the world has forgotten about it while the media downplay its proceedings. All of a sudden then in a coordinated symphony Biden’s administration also came last Friday to launch US trade sanctions.

Nevertheless, the common denominator of the above is the emphasis on the sanctions against China firms that allegedly do business with Russia. As if the West has stopped business with Russia and there are just a handful of Chinese businesses that Putin’s economy depends on. “Putin” aside all the world’s hypocricy on the long standing war in Ukraine soil that inescapably has failed to lead to a peaceful route, adding few Chinese firms to the sanction saga doesn’t really add value to the failed peace brokering efforts, does it?

Instead, this action showcases panic from the American side, loyally then parroted subsequently by the EU, seeing that the momentum the West saw at the beginning of 2022 to hurt Russia big time didn’t bear any significant fruit. The recent analyses on the small impact of the sanctions on Russian economy add to the distress. But if the protracted war in Ukraine doesn’t satisfy the West’s ambitions to hurt Russia and reshuffling global power, then instead of maintaining the profitable war status they might as well try to cut a systemic peace deal there at the UN level.

Then one is left to infer that the only reason for adding a few Chinese companies in the sanction quiver is opportunistic, a coordinated attempt to revisit the anti-China doctrine at the beginning of the 2024 agenda as the scapegoat for the paramount ineffectiveness to promote peace in Ukraine.

In addition, the G7 statement on the war in Ukraine didn’t omit to parrot either the latter with a sentence about “companies from People’s Republic of China”. In the same statement the G7 is praising the resilience of the Ukrainian people and asking Russia to pay $500 billion in reparations for the damage created in Ukraine and at the end commits to promote peace, though for the past 2 years it has failed to do so.

It is clear, therefore, to anyone with useful space between the ears that the West can do nothing more than admit its failure in helping Ukraine broker peace with Russia. If the two sides do not sit together to agree peaceful resolutions with the West endorsing tangible solutions and paying their consequential share, then this significant ineffectiveness will end up making Ukraine the new Syria war lingering for years and years without any light at the end of the tunnel and more and more Ukrainian license plates storming EU capitals.

Surely, targetting a few Chinese companies will not bring peace in Ukraine. It will just create further issues to China-EU relations in 2024 and undermine volatile trade, as China is bound to respond with sanctions and so on and so forth. So, the EU doesn’t benefit from that, nor Ukraine or the mere notion of peace.

Our disturbed world today needs decisiveness and concrete results in important conflicts like Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and the EU has a long way to go to seriously follow up on its Nobel peace prize 12 years later. Sanctioning a few companies will never bring peace resolution. Instead, proposing to Russia and Ukraine a winner compromise and working around that is the way forward, the West knows it but it is always uncannily easier to look for scapegoats from the East while doing hefty business with poor Ukraine amidst this prolonged conflict, ain’t it?