All 27 EU member states approved the bloc's 21st Russia sanctions package on 23 July, eight days after it failed to clear a Coreper vote 1. Coreper is the committee of national ambassadors that prepares Council decisions in Brussels, so its 15 July rejection had left the package stalled short of adoption. Slovakia was the hold-out, and it dropped its objection after winning assurances on a 2028 guarantee for phasing out Russian gas.
The package freezes a price-cap-adjacent mechanism for twelve months, so a rising oil price cannot automatically hand Moscow a higher cap. That matters because the sanctions architecture ties the reference price to the market: without the freeze, the recent crude rebound would have loosened the very ceiling the cap was built to hold down.
The obstruction changed seats but not shape. Hungary had blocked two of Ukraine's EU accession clusters only six days earlier , and the sanctions round has now stalled on one capital at a time twice running. Every member holds an effective veto on foreign policy, so a single government can delay the bloc's Russia measures for a fortnight; the pattern adds friction to each package rather than defeating it, and the next one starts with the same single point of failure.
