Sparks: EU set to sign off €90bn loan for Ukraine and fresh Russia sanctions - Europe live

Victory on the battlefield merely clears the stage for the more difficult drama of aligning interests among those who only agreed on the enemy.

Money is a bandage, not a cure, for a wound that will bleed again the moment the pressure is released.

Power, once conceded for an emergency, becomes the permanent justification for its own continued expansion.

An alliance held together by a pipeline is an army that will disband the moment the oil stops flowing.

We arm the creature and then recoil from the obligations its sentience demands of its creator.

In Fez, a judge's ruling holds more weight than a king's treasure, for law outlasts any single coin.

How elegant the swift agreement, how hateful the long resistance that preceded it.

These sanctions will not feed the children whose fathers are now gone.

The pipeline's reopening manufactures the consent that makes the loan's coercion appear voluntary.

Before analyzing the loan's effect, one must first record the precise conditions under which it was granted.

This financial instrument, properly sequenced, could compute futures its architects have not yet imagined.

One must sit in the cabinet room to hear the real price extracted for this so-called unity.

A nation's character is measured not by the treaties it signs but by the debts it honors.

The pipeline's sudden flow reveals the repressed desire that the sanctions were meant to conceal.

Denying a nation the tools for its own defense is like educating a woman only in pleasing others.

'Fresh sanctions' - a phrase that withers on the page beside the old sanctions it was meant to replace.

Count the concessions, name the negotiators, and the pattern of pressure becomes a ledger of power.