New EU sanctions. Embargo on Russian coal with a slide. Putin’s daughters blacklisted

On Thursday evening, representatives of 27 EU countries in Brussels gave the green light for a new package of sanctions against Russia, which, after being formalized by the EU Council, should enter into force later this week.

The EU has given the green light to new sanctions. More names on the blacklist

The EU extended the black list of Russians with an entry ban and frozen assets in the EU by more than two hundred names. These restrictions apply to both adult daughters of Vladimir Putin (the USA made a similar decision yesterday), i.e. 37-year-old Maria Vorontsova and 36-year-old Ekaterina Tikhonova, as well as three sons of oligarchs and several wives, ex-wives, sisters and mother-in-law of the Kremlin people.

The thickest fish added to the black list are the oligarch Oleg Deripaska, German Gref (president of Sberbank) and Mosze Kantor – a fertilizer mogul and president of the European Jewish Congress (EJC). The EJC has been protesting yesterday after the British sanctions decision against Kantor, but has still not been criticized by the Kremlin’s propaganda about the “denazification” of Ukraine. The domination of the EJC tops by Putin’s people has long been the subject of press criticism in Israel.

And the Yad Vashem center in 2020 regretted the controversy surrounding The World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem (prepared by another Kantor organization). At this conference, where Putin was the guest of honor, a distorted narrative about the Holocaust was presented, in which inconvenient facts about the USSR such as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet occupation of parts of Poland and the Baltic states were not mentioned.

There is coal, but when is oil?

The EU introduces – proposed by the European Commission on Tuesday – a coal embargo from Russia, although with the possibility of, inter alia, by Berlin, a four-month delay for the expiration of current contracts. It was the subject of heated disputes incl. with Polish diplomats unsuccessfully seeking to shorten this transition period. However, Brussels is already getting ready to work on the next, i.e. the sixth, sanctions package, when the debates on the embargo on oil from Russia will surely flare up. – It is oil exports that are one of the foundations of Russian aggression. One of the foundations that allows Russian leaders not to take seriously attempts to negotiate an end to the war and liberate Ukrainian territory, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Wednesday in another message on social media.

While the imminent “partial embargo” on oil, ie limiting its import, for example by means of quotas or taxes, currently has – as the discussions in Brussels show – no small chance, in the case of gas it is quite the opposite. – Do you choose air conditioning on this summer or a room in Ukraine? This is how the problem should be posed – this is how Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi explained on Wednesday Italy’s readiness to embargo on gas from Russia. However, Germany, which promises almost complete independence from Russian gas by mid-2024, publicly argues that an immediate and complete embargo would have worse economic and political consequences for the Union than for Russia.

If the EU comes to a decision about oil soon, the topic of sanctions related to nuclear energy may appear on the table. Some power plants in the EU (mainly in the former Soviet bloc countries) are currently dependent on fuel from Russia. France, in turn, exports to Russia goods related to the nuclear energy industry.

Orban still doesn’t veto

The European Parliament today adopted a resolution calling for an immediate EU embargo on Russian gas, oil, coal and nuclear fuel, but MEPs are only allowed to make non-binding political calls on this issue. The background to the EU dispute over energy resources from Russia is the differences between EU countries as to the assessment of the effectiveness of sanctions to end the war. Poland argues that – as Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki recently put it – “economic crushing” of Russia’s economy is an economic weapon to be used as soon as possible in the war with Russia. However, in the EU there is a group of countries that think about war in the perspective of several weeks rather than many months or several years. This group explains that the effects of a quick gas embargo would not have had time to affect a possible ceasefire, and especially the terms of a ceasefire in such a near future.

On the other hand, in Brussels there is still a widespread belief that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban – despite public polemics with Zelensky and extraordinary restraint against Putin – will not try to veto future EU sanctions alone, which will have the support of the rest of the EU. A few of our interlocutors in Brussels do not exclude that Orban is trying to strengthen his negotiating position towards the European Commission in matters of the rule of law with his public – so far not translated into discussions on the EU forum – suggestions regarding the threatened unity towards Russia.

In addition, the EU decided today to ban the entry of Russian road hauliers, as well as to close EU ports to Russian ships, with the exception of, inter alia, for cargo with food and oil. Additional bans on exports to Russia, incl. for quantum computers and advanced semiconductors are estimated at 10 billion euros per year. And the new import bans from Russia are to apply to purchases worth 5 billion euros a year. The EU has banned transactions with a few – representing 23 percent. Russian banking sector – large Russian banks. Russian companies are not allowed to participate in public procurement tenders in the EU.

The head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, is to meet President Zelensky in Kiev on Friday, April 8. And on Saturday in Warsaw, he will take part in a donors’ conference for Ukraine.

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