The EU sanctions against Russia have to be renewed by a unanimous vote.

It’s a core feature of EU governance, and it’s also why the aggressive growth strategy of the organization is a bad idea. It allows any nation to hold major decisions hostage.

Now, after many years of being punished by, and being used as a political whipping boy by Germany, Greece is looking to discuss EU sanctions against Russia:

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras plan to discuss economic ties and the European Union’s sanctions against Moscow when they meet for talks next week, a Kremlin spokesman said on Friday.

Russia wants the EU to lift the sanctions imposed over Moscow’s role in the turmoil in Ukraine and hopes to get support from some EU member states, notably Hungary and Greece.

The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said it was too early to talk about any possibility of Moscow providing financial help to the cash-strapped Greece before the talks.

“Relations between Moscow and the European Union will be discussed in the light of Brussels’s policy of sanctions and Athens’ quite cold attitude to this policy,” Peskov said.

Greece’s new left-wing government has said it will not seek aid from Moscow but has so far failed to reach a deal with its EU/IMF creditors to unlock fresh funds.

Putin and Tsipras will meet in Moscow on April 8. It will be Tsipras’ first visit to the Russian capital after his leftist Syriza party swept to victory in a snap election in January.

I don’t expect the meeting to generate any substantive policy changes in Greek foreign policy, but it is a warning that, absent some amelioration of the EU and IMF created humanitarian crisis in Greece, there could be substantive changes in EU foreign policy.

The EU and the Euro zone are both in trouble because the people behind it decided to move forward before the necessary economic and political structures were in place. (To say nothing of popular support, as shown by the repeated failures of plebiscites for the treaties and subsequent re-votes.)

I do not think that the Euro will survive in its current form, (I expect pretty much all the non-Germanic nations to drop out eventually) and I would give even money that the EU will either be scaled back to a simple customs union, or that a significant number of members will leave in the next 10-20 years.