Two days after the political agreement reached by the Heads of State and Government of the Twenty-seven at the beginning of the week, the European ambassadors this afternoon gave the final green light to a new round of economic sanctions against Russia in response to the war in Ukraine , as confirmed to this newspaper by European diplomatic sources.
Although the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán accepted on Monday morning the commitment made by his European partners to save the proposal, which had been blocked by this Government for almost a month, there were numerous technical aspects to agree on and at the last minute one more stumbling block arose: Budapest denied that the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Cyril I, was included in the list of sanctioned people. Finally, the European diplomatic representatives have closed all the pending legal fringes and have agreed not to include, for the time being, the religious leader in the list of people who will see their assets in the EU frozen and their access to community territory will be vetoed.
The decision was made this afternoon during a meeting held in Luxembourg. The package of measures, the most complicated and ambitious of all those approved so far by the European Union, includes a partial embargo on Russian oil (a third of the total is excluded, which arrives by pipeline so as not to leave Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, landlocked countries and a high dependence on Russian energy) and in addition to removing several more banks from the Swift payment platform and vetoing the broadcasts of four more media outlets, it expands the list of people close to the Kremlin sanctioned.
The economic impact of the European sanctions is being felt, more and more, in all the parties involved and after the difficult step of vetoing the arrival of Russian oil (at the end of the year, Germany and Poland will stop importing the part they receive through the pipeline of Druzhba, excluded from sanctions, so imports will be reduced by 90%) many European leaders were reluctant to start talking about a hypothetical embargo on Russian gas. “We are entering a very difficult phase. Let's stop for a moment and see what effect it has", proposed the Prime Minister of Belgium, Alexander de Croo, in line with the statements of other leaders. Moscow holds the key to 40% of the current gas supply in the EU.
