MOSCOW, August 27 (RIA Novosti) - The European Parliament did not conduct any of its own official studies on the impact of its sanctions against Russia prior to their implementation or to this day, said Director-General of the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) Anthony Teasdale and Secretary-General of the European Parliament (EP) Klaus Welle on Tuesday.
“On sanctions, no we have not, in the European Parliament Research Service, done any analysis on the financial implications,” said Teasdale in response to a question from RIA Novosti at a Wilson Center event on EU economic integration.
He said there had been no requests from parliamentary committees, noting that “the committees have not been meeting for the last three or four months, because we’ve been having European elections.”
On July 31, the European Commission officially adopted stricter sanctions against Russia. According to the EP officials, this was done without a comprehensive study of the costs to Europeans. The sanctions barred access to secondary capital markets, the arms trade, and trade in technology used in oil exploration and production. Numerous European countries have already argued that the Western countries' sanctions and the food import ban imposed by Russia on August 7 are damaging the economy.
“I was surprised myself that we hadn’t produced this,” said Welle of an outside study citing the impact, specifically, of the European oil trade with Russia being cut back. “On the question of did we calculate the effect of the sanctions specifically on this end, I am not aware of that.”
On August 7, Russia imposed a ban on food imported from the United States, the European Union, Australia, Canada and Norway in response to the Western sanctions. The ban targets meat, seafood, dairy products, fruit and vegetables and other food, and is expected to last one year.
