The oil embargo against Russia, which the EU has now agreed on after a long struggle, is a tough measure.
If all goes according to plan, Russia will lose 90 percent of business with its key customers by the end of the year.
This does not deprive Putin of the means to wage war;
he pays for his army in rubles, which he can have printed himself.
But it is once again depriving the Moscow power clique of a considerable amount of Western currency.
The pie that Putin can distribute is getting smaller.
Unless he can compensate for the loss in Asia, the political pressure on him will increase, even if the current balance of power in the Kremlin is difficult to understand from the outside.
However, Europeans are paying a high political price for the compromise that the Hungarian leadership forced through in Brussels.
Of course, a partial embargo is better than no embargo at all, especially when it affects such large parts of the shipments.
But the economic reasons Orbán put forward are only part of the truth.
In the past he has been careful not to deviate from the foreign policy consensus in the EU (and in NATO).
Orbán is now sending his country on a special path in a crucial question of Europe, which politically amounts to neutrality.
This gives Putin an informal source of information in the EU, and it will not only serve as a model for right-wing populist movements in other EU countries.
For the activist German debate, which has meanwhile reached the semantic question of how to name war goals (of other countries), this Brussels summit night has provided the insight that the real brakes are not in Berlin.
Many are tugging at the cohesion of the West, so it is high time that the federal government found appropriate communication on the issue of arms deliveries.
After all, Germany is now freeing itself further from its toxic dependency on Russia, while Hungary is retaining it.