Why you should read our guide to the sanctions regime

In 2015, Russia signed a deal with the EU to lift the sanctions imposed by the US in retaliation for the annexation of Crimea and the downing of MH17 over Ukraine in 2014.

It followed similar deals with the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea.

In return, Moscow will allow EU-brokered deals to proceed.

However, a number of things must be balanced out in order to ensure that Russia doesn’t use the lifting of sanctions to further destabilise the West.

These include: 1.

The agreement to allow the EU-EU trade pact to proceed, which was agreed by the two leaders at the summit.

The EU-Russia trade deal has been blocked by Russia, due to a dispute over tariffs, but will now proceed as planned.

Under the deal, Russia will continue to export gas to Europe, and will continue working on a new nuclear power plant in the country.

2.

Russia will have to implement a number, if not all, of the sanctions measures agreed by its international partners, including visa bans and asset freezes.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in October 2016 that he expected to lift sanctions as soon as he could.

3.

The European Union will have the final say over the future of the agreement, which means that EU countries must agree to the terms of the deal.

4.

The deal will have a time limit on when it can be lifted.

All of this, in turn, means that there will be no easy answers when it comes to Russia’s willingness to reform.

If Russia can find a way to ease the sanctions without breaching the deal’s time limit, the West will face a difficult decision: either to accept its inevitable collapse, or to support the Kremlin’s destabilisation of the region.

Alexandra Janson is a senior lecturer at Griffith University and the author of the forthcoming book The World After Trump: How the West Must Respond to Russia.

This article was originally published on FourFourSecond.