The EU yesterday heaped more economic sanctions on Russia, adding to US President Donald Trump’s new punitive measures the previous day against the Russian oil industry.
Russian officials and state media dismissed the Western measures, saying they are largely ineffective.
The sanctions are intended as part of a broadened effort to choke off the revenue and supplies that fuel Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and compel Russian President Vladimir Putin to negotiate an end to the war.
Photo: EPA
The measures are a triumph for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who has long campaigned for the international community to punish Russia more comprehensively for attacking his country.
“We waited for this. God bless, it will work, and this is very important,” Zelenskiy said in Brussels, where EU countries attending a summit announced the latest round of Russia sanctions.
Despite US-led peace efforts in the past few months, the war shows no sign of ending after nearly four years, and European leaders are increasingly concerned about the threat from Russia.
Ukrainian forces have largely held Russia’s bigger army at bay in a slow and ruinous war of attrition along a roughly 1,000km front line that snakes along eastern and southern Ukraine.
Almost daily Russian long-range strikes have taken aim at Ukraine’s power grid before the bitter winter, while Ukrainian forces have targeted Russian oil refineries and manufacturing plants.
The EU measures especially target Russian oil and gas. They ban imports of Russian liquefied natural gas into the bloc, and add port bans on more than 100 new ships in the Russian shadow fleet of hundreds of aging tankers that are dodging sanctions.
The latest sanctions bring the total number of such ships to be banned to 557.
The measures also target transactions with a cryptocurrency increasingly used by Russia to circumvent sanctions; prohibit operations in the bloc using Russian payment cards and systems; restrict the provision of artificial intelligence services and high-performance computing services to Russian entities; and widen an export ban to include electronic components, chemicals and metals used in military manufacturing.
A new system for limiting the movement of Russian diplomats within the 27-nation EU would also be introduced.
International crude prices yesterday rose more than US$2 per barrel on news of the additional sanctions.
The US sanctions against Russian oil companies Rosneft and Lukoil came after Trump said that his plan for a swift meeting with Putin was on hold because he did not want it to be a “waste of time.”
It was the latest twist in Trump’s hot-and-cold efforts to end the war as Putin refuses to budge from his demands.
However, the sanctions do not take effect for almost a month, until Nov. 21, potentially giving Putin a chance for a change of heart.
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