Ukraine, the de-targetization of EU sanctions, and the rise of the European commission as architect of EU foreign policy

The February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine constituted a shock to the European Security ecosystem, catapulting it into a new geopolitical era and potentially redistributing the cards of who, how and in what way European security is organized. This contribution to the forum zoom-in on the case of European sanctions making in reaction to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia and argues it consisted in a significant deviation from the usual 'European way of sanctioning' both in terms of the substance of the sanctions and the process through which they were adopted. Empirically, I argue that core innovation has been the European Commission emerging as the main architect of those sanctions regimes instead of the European External Action Service (EEAS) and the EU Member States. Analytically, I argue that this increasing role of the European Commission in EU sanctions policy is explained by the 'de-targetization' of EU sanctions, moving away from mainly relying on a few 'surgical' individual listings in favor of a renewed focus of more comprehensive forms of sanctioning.