The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyenand the head of diplomacy Joseph Borrell will arrive in kyiv this Friday to meet with the Ukrainian president Vorodimir Zelenskywith a fresh new sanctions package against the regime of Vladimir Putin under his arm. After two days of intense negotiations and some “technical adjustments”, the permanent ambassadors of the Twenty-seven have reached an agreement on the fifth round of sanctions which includes, for the first time, measures against the Russian energy sector and specifically the coal import ban from Russia.
As the Community Executive advanced in its proposal last Tuesday, the impact of this measure will be about 4,000 million euros per year, a rather symbolic blow compared to the 700 or 800 million a day that the European Union allocates to pay for the gas and oil it receives from Russia and that since the beginning of the war represents more than 35,000 million euros, as recognized this past Wednesday Borrell before the plenary session of the European Parliament. According to diplomatic sources, the coal embargo will not apply to existing contracts until August as it will have a transition period of 120 days.
As announced by the French presidency of the EU, the new battery of measures includes the freezing of the assets of several Russian banks -Brussels proposed four including VTB, the second largest in the country, which will affect 23% of the market share in the Russian banking sector-; the arms shipment embargo to Russia; the ban on exports of technological goods of high added value estimated at 10,000 million euros and that will include sensitive machinery, transport equipment or semiconductors; as well as the ban on some critical materials from Russia worth 5,500 million. In addition, the battery includes an old request from numerous delegations, such as the prohibition of access to European ports for ships flying the Russian flag, although with exceptions for some essential services such as food, and limitations for Russian and Belarusian road carriers.
The package is completed with new individual sanctions to “oligarchs, Russian propaganda actors, members of the security and military apparatus as well as entities from the industrial and technological sector linked to the Russian aggression against Ukraine. The new battery of sanctions, which Brussels proposed after learning of the Bucha massacre and which has required several meetings at the level of ambassadors to be polished to the liking of all delegations, will be adopted by written procedure and will enter into force once it is published this Friday in the Official Journal of the EU. Diplomatic sources have justified the delays in the adoption of the decision in the need to clarify technical issues about the prohibition of access to ports, discomfort and discomfort because Brussels publicly presented the proposal before making the Twenty-seven participants, who are the ones who have the last decision.
Sooner or later, oil
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Although neither Russian oil nor gas are included in the new batch of sanctions, as Poland, the three Baltic republics or the European Parliament have repeatedly demanded for weeks in a resolution approved this Thursday, the head of European diplomacy has advanced this Thursday from NATO that the ban on oil imports will be on the table of the EU foreign ministers when they meet next Monday in Luxembourg. “Sooner or later, and I hope sooner, it will happen,” he has said of one of the Kremlin’s main sources of income. In fact, the EU’s decision to keep these two hydrocarbons safe has received a harsh rebuke from the Ukrainian foreign minister. As long as the West continues to buy gas and oil from Russia, it will be supporting Ukraine with one hand and the Russian machinery with the other. Dimytro Kuleba.
Von der Leyen herself already advanced last Tuesday that the Community Executive is already working on additional sanction positions on oil in the form of surcharges or payments to blocked accounts. Also the President of the European Council, Charles Michaeladmitted this Wednesday that “sooner or later” sanctions against gas and oil will be necessary, a possibility that countries such as Germany or Austria due to the economic impact that the decision will have given the high dependence on Russia. Either Hungary is for the task of turning off the tap on Russian gas. Countries like EstoniaInstead, they have officially announced that they will stop importing gas from Russia before the end of the year.