Greece held up approval of the European Union’s latest sanctions package against Russia for several weeks, securing an exemption for the shipping company Dynagas. The dispute has now prompted officials in Brussels to reconsider how future restrictions should be adopted, according to the Financial Times.

Athens refused to back the package until other EU members agreed that Dynagas vessels could continue transporting Russian liquefied natural gas to countries outside the bloc. The newspaper described the concession as the first weakening of the EU’s collective sanctions framework against Russia.

Until now, the system relied on the assumption that the economic costs of new measures would be shared among several member states. The dispute over Dynagas showed that a single capital could delay an entire package while defending its own commercial interests.

Brussels is therefore considering approving restrictions separately or dividing them into smaller thematic groups. Such an approach would prevent one country’s veto from blocking all the other measures included in a sanctions package.

Greek officials argued that the ban on LNG transportation had been agreed by mistake. In their view, the restriction would have harmed Dynagas more than the Russian economy while strengthening rival shipowners from China and other countries outside the EU.