EU Slapped Russia with Another 6 Months of Sanctions

• 06.22.2015, 19:46
•  Europe,  World

Today, on June 22, the European Union confirmed that it will extend its sanctions against Russia until at least the end of January 2016.

Thus at the foreign ministers' meeting in Luxembourg the six-month extension of the sanctions was approved. The sanctions were "introduced in response to Russia's destabilizing role in eastern Ukraine," an EU statement said.

The sanctions include limits of access to some financial markets, a ban on certain technologies and exchanges between the bloc and Russia in energy and defense sectors. Enacted last July and reinforced in September, the sanctions had been due to expire in July, the Daily Mail informs.

Russia’s reaction to this came very soon. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declared that everything will be based on the "principle of reciprocity," suggesting that it would extend counter-sanctions that include a ban on Western food imports, The Moscow Times reports.

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, in his turn, told that despite Russia’s economy being put under pressure because of the sanctions, the foreign investors had already started returning to the Russian market as a certain stabilization in the economic climate was noticed.
As for the Russian Foreign Ministry, it was deeply disappointed that once again the view of the "Russophobic lobby" prevailed in the European Union, and that it was wrong to hold Russia fully responsible for not implementing the Minsk peace agreements, since the key to the final settlement is in Ukraine’s hands.

The most interesting part of the Foreign Ministry statement however, was the part where it considered EU "cynical" to make such a decision on this very day, June 22, the day in 1941 when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

Though German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier insisted that the extension of sanctions was already likely before Monday's gathering, the Russian Foreign Ministry statement said they would like to believe that this was just a coincidence, not a specially designed step by their European colleagues.

The West has started imposing sanctions on Russia since March 2014 in the wake of the drastic events evolving in Ukraine at that time. First, an early EU summit stalled the talks on a visa-free regime and a new base agreement on Russia-EU cooperation. Further on, the sanctions were grouped into three categories - personal, corporate and sectoral, TASS reports.

By the beginning of September, some 420 Russian individuals and 143 companies have been put on the sanction lists of the European Union, the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, Switzerland and Norway.

The sectoral sanctions imposed for a term of one year include an embargo on the supply of arms to Russia and the importation of Russian weapons and related materials, a ban on the delivery of dual-purpose products and technologies to Russia, as well as innovative technologies for Russia’s oil extracting industry.