Cultural Diplomacy and Sanctions as Foreign Policy Instruments during a Time of Conflict

In 2014, the EU imposed sanctions on the Russian Federation as a consequence of the annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine. At the same time, Austria, the UK, and Germany celebrated cultural diplomacy events with Russia, whereas Poland cancelled the Polish Year planned for 2015 in Russia. Many member countries of the European Union understood cultural diplomacy as a subnetwork of public diplomacy and ascribed it to the potential for international conflict prevention in 2014. This article aims to discuss these claims, in line with Foreign Policy Analysis and to search for any coordination of cultural diplomacy with sanctions at the time of the first stage of the Ukrainian war. The authors concluded that the EU countries’ cultural diplomacy and sanctions on Russia were hardly intertwined. Bilateral Years or Seasons of Culture aptly represented the EU countries’ belief that the Russian Federation should not be fully isolated.