The EU is considering abandoning its practice of bundling Russia sanctions into large, all-or-nothing packages in favour of smaller, thematic ones, the Financial Times reported, after Greece’s veto delayed the bloc’s 21^st sanctions package and left it weaker than before.

The sanctions are becoming increasingly ineffective as member states increasingly seek calve outs and exceptions to protect business their leading companies still have with Russia. Although many companies promised to quit the Russian market after the start of the war with Ukraine, as IntelliNews reported less than 9% of foreign firms have fully exited the Russian market.

The main obstacle to passing the 21^st package was a Greek veto until it won a one year exception to a ban on shipping Russian oil by Greek tankers. Austria was also pushing to protect its Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) which continues to run a highly profitable business in Russia. But some of the special interests took the wrangling to an extreme; a ban on importing Russian fish was removed from the docket thanks to pressure from Europe’s fish finger industry. And sable pelts were also removed, following pressure from Europe’s luxury fur-makers.

The new “small but sharper” sanctions is an attempt to make stitching new packages together less prone to obfuscation: rather than negotiating sweeping packages that any one of the EU’s 27 members can hold hostage to unrelated national demands, officials believe smaller, more targeted rounds would cut the risk of delay and give individual capitals less leverage.

EU ambassadors only agreed the 21st package on July 23, more than a week late, after Athens held out for a carve-out protecting Dynagas, a shipping firm owned by Greek billionaire George Prokopiou, from a separate, already-adopted measure restricting European vessels from moving Russian LNG to third countries. Greece won an exemption for contracts signed before the 2022 invasion, subject to annual review, while new or expanded contracts remain banned.

The package had already been diluted before Greece’s veto even surfaced, as member states resisted elements of the proposed oil price cap. It is also the second time in three months a single state has held up a sanctions round: Hungary and Slovakia only lifted their veto on the twentieth sanctions package in April, unlocking a €90bn Ukraine loan and Russia’s toughest sanctions round yet.

Officials now argue that narrower, subject-specific packages – one on shipping, another on banking, for instance – would be harder for a single capital to leverage for unrelated domestic demands, and would attract less of the high-profile political attention that has repeatedly let individual governments extract concessions in exchange for lifting a veto.

No formal proposal has yet been tabled, and any change to the EU’s sanctions procedure would itself require unanimous member-state backing.