Top EU Warmonger Admits Sanctions against Russia Are a Failure

Yet another rabid advocate of economic warfare against Moscow has discredited Brussels’ narrative on its “successful” sanctions regime. The bitter recognition came from Guy Verhofstadt, a member of the European Parliament since 2009, and former Prime Minister of Belgium from 1999 to 2008.

He tweeted on Jan. 2: “9 packages of sanctions and the effect is less than 0. We are rewarding Russia for its war against us.” Below that, he reprinted a chart from the Politico news outlet, showing that in 2022, Russian imports increased to all EU member-countries, except Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Sweden and the Baltic States. The statistics are all taken from Eurostat and compare the monetary value of imports from Feb. to Aug. 2022 to the same time period in 2021.

The highest increase goes to Slovenia, at 346%, although the total value is fairly low (€1.1 bn). In terms of percentage, Austria is in fourth place with a 139% increase and a total of €3.9 bn. Among the major EU countries, Italy had a 100% increase (€9.6 bn), followed by France at 84% (€9.5 bn), the Netherlands at 51% (8.48 bn) and Germany at 33% (€20.7 bn). Even Poland saw an increase in imports of 21%.

Politico further comments that it is “even more damning” that EU investments in Russia remained at a much higher level than public announcements suggested, with overall, foreign direct investment from EU countries remaining “largely unchanged” after the start of the Ukraine war.

These figures are, of course, terribly upsetting for someone like Guy Verhofstadt, who was personally on the Maidan on Feb. 21, 2014 to push for the coup in Kiev, andwas banned from entering Russia as an EU politician in May 2015. As for his views on European Union policy, Verhofstadt is infamous for his hardline stance against Greece from 2010 on. He strongly attacked then Greek Prime Minister Tsipras, who was present in person at the EU Parliament, demanding he put an end to Greece’s “oversized bloated public sector” and to the “patronage system” which he accused Tsipras of using for his own purposes. He later treated Italy’s Prime Minister Conte with the same disdain when the latter visited Strasbourg in 2019.