This is becoming a meme, like that "Nothing bad can happen to the UK because of Brexit, because Germans like British cars" thing that people repeated for no obvious reason.
The EU has quite detailed and widespread plans to fuck up the Russian economy on a near permanent basis. They'd basically already done so by taking climate change seriously while Putin tried to pretend it wasn't happening, now they're hitting fast-forward on that plan and specifically targeting Russian carbon first.
Russian coal and oil is the easy bit to do and it hurts Russia more, so they're doing that first. It's like shouting at someone with a sniper rifle, "why don't you come out and fight me like a man?". Because it would be strategically unwise and totally unnecessary in order to beat you, is one potential answer.
The EU has quite detailed and widespread plans to fuck up the Russian economy on a near permanent basis. They'd basically already done so by taking climate change seriously while Putin tried to pretend it wasn't happening, now they're hitting fast-forward on that plan and specifically targeting Russian carbon first.
Russian coal and oil is the easy bit to do and it hurts Russia more, so they're doing that first. It's like shouting at someone with a sniper rifle, "why don't you come out and fight me like a man?". Because it would be strategically unwise and totally unnecessary in order to beat you, is one potential answer.