There is no reason to think that, after the war is over, the sanctions will be lifted. I mean, why would they be lifted? Europe is not going to return to Russia the assets that were frozen/seized or start wanting to trade with Russia -- or vice versa -- moreover there are already new pipelines and trade agreements made within Eurasia that exclude Europe as a market for energy.
This is a permanent change ushering in a new cold war and a new multipolar world, where it's going to be hard (but not impossible) for commodities to cross bloc boundaries. Russia's commodities are going to be flowing east and south, Saudi Arabia's will be flowing mostly to China, while North American commodities will be staying mostly in North America.
After permanently and irreparably rupturing the previous trade relationships, Europe is going to have to become more energy independent, and I think they realize now that the previous energy dependence they had was a strategic weakness for them. They will need to learn to do with less energy at least until they ramp up domestically produced replacements such as nuclear or renewables + storage.
https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/european-community-...
EU sanctions against others may also cease after a regime change. US lifted sanctions against Vietnam.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States–Vietnam_relation...
They would correctly view that as lack of an energy policy. Europe requires an energy policy for the world that exists, not the world it wishes would exist.
We have not been able to change the regime in Syria, Iran or Cuba despite decades trying. Not sure why you think China or Russia is going to be a more realistic target. FYI, the successor to Putin is Medvedev, who is much more of an anti-western hardliner. If Europe is pinning its hopes for the future on regime change in Russia, then the people of Europe deserve much more competent leadership.
It's like the prospect of some things are so terrible as to be unthinkable and when something is unthinkable, you don't come up with a plan to deal with it. Instead, you shout down anyone who brings up the unmentionable thing. For Europe, the list of unthinkable things keeps growing:
* What if they can't deploy enough energy storage at scale to make their renewable push actually work? Unthinkable!
* What if there is no regime change in Russia, and the present situation just continues for a few decades. Unthinkable!
* What will they do with millions of Ukrainian refugees that refuse to or are unable to return home? And the many millions more that will be flooding in soon? Unthinkable!
So this deer in the headlights inability to face reality is the leadership problem. And the sad thing is that Europe does have options. There is coal in Poland, Natural gas in Germany, Nuclear in France, Wind in Italy. They can scale up production of domestic sources and deal with the stark reality that they need to become much more energy independent OR they can spend $200 billion subsidizing the purchase of imported natural gas for consumers, just hoping that things "go back to normal after the war".
That's not true. The sanctions against Cuba remain in place because a small but significant number of Cuban exiles care very much and they happen to be mostly concentrated in a swing state
I'm not sure how we could move Cuban-Americans somewhere else unless you are suggesting forced relocations to other parts of the U.S.
Levis wants to sell them jeans. Apple wants to sell them phones. GM wants to sell them truck. Raytheon wants to sell them radar systems. There's just so much money to be made when a formerly isolated market become unlocked that I think you could win back Florida and more with all the donations from the big corporations that would stand to benefit from normalized relations with Cuba.
I think the only reason nothing happens is because there's no one sector that really stands to benefit and can make a concentrated lobbying effort whereas the people that don't want it are a unified ethnic group which for the purposes of high level political analysis can roughly be seen as a voting block.
Ditto all this for Iran, but move all the decimals to the right once or twice.
(11.3M people, per capita GDP $9,500 or so.)
US Presidential politics has been on a knife edge for the past 2+ decades, with multiple popular-vote-minority presidents elected (or appointed, according to some, notably Bush-Gore 2000).
There are a handful of swing states, with Ohio and Florida topping the list via Google Ngram Viewer. The term "swing state of " starts appearing notably around 1995, and has been persistent since the 2000 election.
<https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=swing+state+of...>
(Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, New , Illinois, and Virginia make the top six over that period. "New" seems likely to be "New York", though it could be the combined effect of "New York" and "New Jersey".)
And again, Cuban politics and policy is absolutely pivotal in Florida.
Also russian controlled gas storage in Germany decided to keep fill levels in storage artificially low. This had direct impact on price and also not part of the sanctions, tho still part of the wider war of russian aggression.
It looks to them like a price-driven transition and if you are a market forces kind of person, the investments in renewables are already following the market pricing structure.
1. https://energyandcleanair.org/eu-co2-emissions-reach-a-30-ye...
High energy prices right now are mostly the result of the Ukraine war. It's painful now, but it is accelerating the conversion from fossil fuels. At least if this doesn't expand into a larger war.