In recent months, discussion of Aughinish Alumina has dominated the Irish media. The County Limerick bauxite-processing plant is Europe’s largest alumina refinery and exports approximately half of its production to Russia.

In the spring, claims were made that its output might be used in the manufacture of military hardware. An obvious course of action has been proposed by campaigners: cut off the alumina supply, reduce Russia’s ability to wage war and stop the killing in Ukraine. But is it really that simple? If we are serious about saving lives in Ukraine, we need to dig deeper.

Government investigations into the supply chain have not found anything incriminating.

Realistically, alumina is not a metal that is in short supply. Well over half of global capacity is in China, and the market is suffering a glut due to expansion there. Russia can easily turn to other sources to meet its civilian or military needs.

Sadly, it must be concluded that the war in Ukraine will not be affected by sanctions against Aughinish Alumina. The main effect will be to cause severe damage to the regional economy in County Limerick, where hundreds of jobs depend on the plant.

The futility of attempting to sanction Aughinish Alumina illustrates the pointlessness of the wider sanctions regime. The EU has imposed twenty-one rounds of sanctions on Russia in the last four years. Kaja Kallas recently claimed that “EU sanctions have already cost Russia dearly”. But its economy, far from buckling under the sanctions regime, is doing far better than Europe’s. Since 2023, Russia’s growth rate has been 3.3%, while that of the Eurozone has been 0.9%.

Russia has spent the years since 2014 making its economy more resilient to sanctions and reorienting its trade away from Europe towards global partners such as India and China. Ian Proud, a former British diplomat, has contended that “economic sanctions have proven a catastrophic disaster – not for Russia, but for Europe”. Sanctions have significantly contributed to Germany’s recent deindustrialisation as it abandons cheap Russian gas imports.

When we see round after round of sanctions being announced, it is hard not to draw the conclusion that the primary aim is to lend support to official EU narratives about the conflict rather than to bring the war to an end in practical terms. We are constantly told that Russia is losing and will eventually lose, and that Ukraine is on the verge of a breakthrough and, if we only continue our support, its armed forces will achieve victory. This false narrative implicitly maintains that the fighting must continue and that diplomacy should under no circumstances be pursued.

Since the failure of the Istanbul deal in April 2022, allegedly sabotaged by Boris Johnson, such a stance has had disastrous consequences for Ukraine. It has suffered more than half a million military casualties, with approximately 150,000 soldiers dead. This is a vast tragedy, a mountain of personal suffering and misery.

It is also an irreparable loss for a country whose demographic situation was already calamitous in the post-Soviet period. While reporting on the war in Ukraine typically focuses on the amount of territory lost, it has long been understood that a country’s population is at least as important as, if not more important than, the land it occupies.

Ukraine has lost about 12% of its territory since 2022, but it has also lost millions of citizens through fighting and emigration. Ukrainian demographers estimate that the population has fallen from 52 million at the time of independence in 1991 to 28 million today. Ukraine’s primary existential threat is not the loss of territory but the loss of its people.

Only this week, Iuliia Mendel, Volodymyr Zelensky’s former press secretary, wrote: “Russia can draw on the recruitment pool of approximately ten times the number of fighting-age men. Waging a war of attrition is therefore national suicide, not valour. Yet this is the strategy that the Zelensky government pursues.”

While Vladimir Putin has never had to resort to conscription, Kyiv is not only forcing men to fight but also adopting extremely brutal methods to coerce them into doing so.

Under the policy known as “busification”, conscription-age men are effectively kidnapped off the streets and sent to the front. Article 35 of Ukraine’s Constitution theoretically guarantees the right to alternative service for conscientious objectors, but that right has effectively ceased to exist. Beatings are commonplace, and men have died at mobilisation centres. Recruitment officers have quotas to meet, and men with serious conditions, including HIV, tuberculosis and cancer, are routinely declared fit for service.

One well-informed commentator reports that “the image of a Ukraine filled with patriotic liberals eager to fight a high-tech war until total Russian collapse is a fiction”. Ukraine is suffering a desertion crisis, with the defence minister reporting earlier this year that 200,000 soldiers were absent without leave.

It is all very well for Western politicians and commentators, from the safety of Brussels and other European capitals, to demand that the fighting continue and to cast any form of negotiation with Putin as granting him victory. But what about the dead Ukrainian bodies over which these arguments are made? What of the widows, orphans and people left crippled in Ukraine?

The EU has recently excluded newly arriving military-age Ukrainian men from the bloc’s temporary protection scheme. Legal questions have been raised, but it is clearly wrong for the Republic of Ireland to send such individuals back to face unethical and illegal practices within Ukraine’s conscription system.

If anyone is deserving of asylum, it is those fleeing this abusive system. If Ireland wants to save Ukrainian lives, the most obvious practical step is to continue offering sanctuary to all Ukrainians, rather than sanctioning Aughinish Alumina.

Our government should also do everything in its power to press the EU to engage in serious diplomatic efforts to bring the fighting to an end as soon as possible. This reflects the wishes of the Ukrainian population. In a recent Gallup poll, 66% said Ukraine should seek to negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, Ukrainians no longer appear to have the final say over their future. EU leaders have consistently backed unrealistic maximalist aims that effectively amount to a veto on negotiations.

Michael von der Schulenburg, MEP for Germany and a former Assistant Secretary-General of the UN, recently said: “European NATO-states must ask themselves whether a continuation of the war – which they have demanded and supported – can still be morally justified at all”.

Europe needs to abandon its bellicose rhetoric, return to the negotiating table and start saving Ukrainian lives rather than sacrificing them.

Dr Mihail Evans is a Research Fellow at the New Europe College, Bucharest.

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