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Many governments are skeptical that the sanctions agaist Russia could actually get Putin to back down. In German security policy circles, that outcome is considered almost impossible. The thumbscrews the West has thus far implemented "haven't instilled much fear" in Putin and his associates, one security official argued. Russia has little foreign debt and large currency reserves, giving it a transitional period of at least two years -- enough time to find new buyers and distribution routes for Russian gas. "We'll be sitting in the cold before the Russians run out of money," says one security official.

Putin's determination to secure his influence over eastern Ukraine is also related to the region's importance to the Russian armaments industry. The Russian army's airplane motors, gear boxes and rocket equipment are, according to Western knowledge, in large part built in eastern Ukraine. That's why the Kremlin has also, according to the security official, planned painful economic sanctions of its own. "If the Russian leadership sees itself as strong, even if we don't see it that way, then it will also act strong -- and at the moment it feels very strong."

Although the 28 EU member states try hard to project a sense of unity to the outside world, their differences in opinion make themselves felt in internal meetings. Merkel is afraid that, in the end, the Union's disunity could spill into the open and Putin would have accomplished one of his important goals, dividing the Europeans.

Looking for Ways to Avoid the Issue - That's another reason why the German government wants to avoid, at all cost, a situation in which sanctions are unavoidable. Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has pointed out that Moscow has recently stopped questioning the legitimacy of the Ukrainian presidential elections, which are planned for May 25. The German government is grasping for these kinds of signals, because they may serve as a reason not to implement the third level of sanctions.

Before concrete steps can be defined, the EU also needs to discuss when the third level should even be implemented -- a way to skirt the delicate situation. "Clearly there will be economic sanctions if Putin sabotages the vote," says a high-ranking government official. "But it's unclear what would constitute sabotage."

One way to at least defer the debate around sanctions would be to push the Ukrainians to delay the vote. But the German government does not want that at all, because it would seem like a capitulation to Putin. "A delay isn't in our script," Markus Ederer, a state secretary in Steinmeier's Foreign Ministry, stated last Wednesday during a session of the German parliament's foreign affairs committee.