This thesis investigates justifications for the economic sanctions from European Union (EU) member states against Russia in the Ukraine conflict. Statements that are made by EU member state representatives are sorted into categories representing cosmopolitan and communitarian kinds of justification. These two categories are chosen since previous research has shown that a political cleavage forms between them. They represent two opposing camps, cosmopolitanism embodies the interests of the international community and communitarianism depicts the states´ self-interest. The European Council (EC) serves as the discussion forum, since the EU contains multiple administrative layers that all have their own interests. The categorizing scale is based on moral cosmopolitanism, Kantian ethics, communitarianism, and Walzer´s just war doctrine and combined with abductively derived mid-range theories. By using these theories, the thesis is a case of analyzing the ethical and just reasoning of tools in the international realm such as economic sanctions. This leads us to the following research questions: (1) How do EC members justify their support or objection to the continuation of the sanctions against Russia in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict after the second invasion? (2) Which of the content arguments are made on the basis of communitarian justification and on the basis of moral cosmopolitan justifications? These questions are investigated in a single case study on EU economic sanctions in the Russian-Ukraine war with the help of qualitative content analysis, looking at audio-visual information published by the EC. Out of the analysis arises that mostly cosmopolitan arguments are used by EC members and especially signaling and punishing arguments are ways to support economic sanctions. Energy supply arguments are mostly used to object sanctions in this case.