EU regulators yesterday began analyzing product-by-product the impact of a Russian ban on EU food imports announced in retaliation for Western sanctions over Moscow’s actions in Ukraine.
However, they said it was too soon to decide how much, if any, of a 400 million euro (US$535 million) EU compensation fund might be paid out to farmers.
EU Commissioner for Agriculture Dacian Ciolos interrupted the European Commission’s August break to return to Brussels at the weekend with other senior staff to set up a task force on the ban.
Photo: EPA
The aim is to work out alternative markets and analyze the fallout from Russia’s one-year ban, announced last week, on imports of meat, fish, dairy, fruit and vegetables from the US, EU, Canada, Australia and Norway.
With some member states piling on the pressure for redress, they could also agree to award compensation from a special fund signed into law at the end of last year as part of agricultural reforms.
Agricultural experts from the EU’s 28 member states are to meet in Brussels on Thursday to plan a coordinated strategy.
While the commission has said it reserves the right to respond to Russia’s ban, Ciolos has said any response must be proportionate.
On the ground in Ukraine, rockets slammed into a high-security prison in the rebel-held city of Donetsk yesterday, igniting a riot that allowed more than 100 prisoners to flee, authorities said.
Donetsk City Council spokesman Maxim Rovinsky said a direct rocket hit killed at least one inmate and left three severely wounded. In the chaos, he said 106 prisoners escaped, included some jailed for murder, robbery and rape.
In the past week, government forces have intensified their military operations and surrounded Donetsk. Rocket fire and shelling have become a feature of daily life, and hundreds of thousands have fled.
The prison break came after a substation providing the jail with electricity was damaged, disabling the facility’s alarm system.
“Extremely dangerous prisoners are now free. It is hard to know the extent of threat this poses to the city, which is flooded with weapons,” Rovinsky said.
Officials with Ukraine’s state penitentiary service said later that 34 prisoners had returned to the jail. It was not immediately possible to verify that claim.
Despite the raging fighting, US actor and musician Steven Seagal gave a concert in the breakaway region of Crimea, Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported.
It said that Seagal, who knows Russian President Vladimir Putin, performed on a stage decorated with the flag of pro-Russian separatists with his blues band on Saturday in Sevastopol at a concert organized by a Russian nationalist motorcycle gang known as the Night Wolves.
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