Dutch military police escort a procession of hearses carrying victims of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash. Photograph by Marco de Swart/Reuters.

Finally, eight days after the shooting down, in Ukraine, of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, the remains of some of the two hundred and ninety-eight victims are being returned to their families. Haunting photographs show dozens of coffins being transported in hearses from Eindhoven Air Base toward Hilversum, a small city southeast of Amsterdam, where they will be turned over to forensics experts. Wednesday was declared a national day of mourning in the Netherlands, home to a hundred and ninety-four of the dead—the country’s first such observance in more than fifty years. Elsewhere, including in Malaysia and Australia, governments are preparing to receive what’s left of their citizens who were aboard the doomed flight.

As the cortege made its way from the airport on Thursday, Dutch people lined the route and quietly applauded, a welcome sign that humanity hasn’t completely slipped its moorings. But while some victims and their families are being accorded the dignity they deserve, the remains of scores of others may well still be scattered across the crash site, which, even now, hasn’t been fully secured. At the Ukraine Crisis Media Center, in Kiev, a Dutch official said that there were still “some lunatics” hampering the search being carried out by Ukrainian emergency workers and Dutch police. “It’s very hard for us to get to the bodies, to get to the remains,” he said. “You call it terrorists. To me, it’s criminals. But it’s very near the same.”

With even the basics—establishing proper control over the crash site, getting a serious investigation up and running—still undone, you might think that the international community would be exerting more pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin. His government appears to bear ultimate responsibility for the attack. On Friday, the twenty-eight members of the European Union reached a preliminary agreement to impose new economic sanctions and an arms embargo on Moscow, and to bar Russia’s large state-owned banks from Europe’s capital markets, where they secure a good deal of the financing they need. After a meeting of E.U. ambassadors in Brussels, a spokesman for the European Commission, the bureaucracy that administers the Union’s policies, said it “will now come forward with the legislative proposals very swiftly.”

At this stage, though, it’s far from clear how much impact the new sanctions, which could be formally agreed upon as early as next week, will have on the Russian economy. On the face of it, the new proposal appears to represent a significant escalation from previous E.U. measures—but the devil is in the details, which have yet to be worked out. British diplomats, keen to promote the City of London, which services Russian money, will be going through the language of the banking proposals meticulously, seeking to limit their impact. The French, who supply arms to Moscow, will be seeking to make sure that their existing contracts aren’t affected. And the Germans, who receive about a third of their natural gas from Russia, will be scrutinizing any restrictions on Gazprom and other Russian energy exporters.

“There’s a triple-lock in Europe,” Mujtaba Rahman, an analyst at the Eurasia Group consultancy, told the Wall Street Journal before the new agreement was announced. “Germany doesn’t want to do energy, France doesn’t want to do defense, and the U.K. doesn’t want to do finance.”

Has that triple lock now been broken? I doubt it. We already know that Russia’s energy sector—which supplies power to many European countries, not just Germany—is likely to escape most of the new restrictions. The exact terms of the arms embargo have yet to be decided, but it isn’t expected to have any effect on existing contracts, such as France’s delivery, later this year, of a Mistral warship. That leaves the new financial sanctions, and I’d be willing to wager that they won’t be as draconian as they might appear, either.

All in all, it looks like Putin, who earlier this week appeared to be getting a bit rattled by the international outrage directed at him, has reason to smile. If Russia did supply the missile that downed MH17, its president bears responsibility for an attack that, though almost certainly directed at the wrong target, killed almost two hundred citizens of a core member of NATO, along with nearly a hundred others. In response, he gets what seems a very modest punishment. Not a slap on the wrist, perhaps, but also not anything that will threaten his continued hold on power, or even his belligerent approach to Ukraine.

To what does Putin owe his good fortune? Realpolitik, of course—and that doesn’t apply only to the European response. The Obama Administration, engaged on many fronts, needs Putin’s support as it deals with Iran and Syria. Blanket sanctions on Russia’s energy industry, or financial sanctions that did real damage to the oligarchs who support Putin, would surely not encourage his full coöperation.

Since there weren’t any Americans aboard MH17, the Obama Administration isn’t facing much political pressure to get tough with Russia. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t concerned. On July 16th, the day before the plane went down, the U.S. government, responding to Russia’s stonewalling in Ukraine, expanded its existing sanctions to include limits on how much money four big Russian entities—two banks and two energy companies—can raise on Wall Street.

So far Washington’s reaction to the Malaysia Airlines tragedy has been largely restricted to talk. Earlier this week, a White House official said that the Administration was considering a new round of sanctions against Russia. Since then, however, there hasn’t been much follow-up. Before criticizing the Europeans for their reluctance to put principle before self-interest, we ought to look closer to home.