Elusive eleventh
Eighteen days after agreeing the EU’s last sanctions package against Russia, a handful of eastern states are banging the drum for the next salvo. But the chances they will get their way are slim.
Context: since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year the EU has passed 10 packages of sanctions, targeting individuals, companies and entire sectors of the economy. They have also included bans on trading certain products, and price caps on exports such as crude oil.
A group of countries including Poland will use a meeting of ambassadors tomorrow to reiterate demands for measures targeting Russia’s nuclear energy and diamond industries and for a review of the level of the price cap on Russian oil exports.
The issue is that the first has already been vetoed by states whose nuclear plants rely on Russian supplies, action on the second has been outsourced to the G7 group of countries, and the US has made clear it thinks the third is unnecessary.
“None of the suggestions are new, we’ve heard them all before,” said an EU diplomat. “They’re welcome to raise them again but nobody is seriously considering another package.”
Those against new sanctions say that increasing the effectiveness of existing measures and closing loopholes are more important.
Furthermore, adding more sanctions against individuals (as we explained yesterday) and embargoes on specific products that Russia could repurpose for military use can be done ad hoc, officials say, and don’t need to be packaged.
That attitude is grating on sanctions proponents, who are also fighting against efforts to add exemptions and derogations to existing measures that they see as watering down their impact.
And for countries that are neither pushing for more sanctions nor in principle against them, the huge diplomatic effort required to get the 10th package over the line last month (a few hours before a midnight deadline and after weeks of haggling) has lessened the appetite.
“That was supposed to be an ‘easy’ package,” said one official involved in those tortuous negotiations. “And we all know how it turned out.”