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Sixth Package of EU Sanctions Includes Restrictions on Russian Oil Delivered by Sea: French Mission

14:09 GMT, 2 June 2022
CC BY-SA 2.0 / Sergio Russo / Green Oil
Ilya Tsukanov
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Hungary torpedoed an earlier draft of Brussels' proposed sixth package of sanctions against Russia late last month, citing a ban on oil imports whose impact Budapest said would be equivalent to dropping an "atomic bomb" on the economy. EU officials subsequently went back to the drawing board to think up a revamped package of restrictions.
Sputnik
The sixth package of sanctions against Russia includes a ban on the purchase of Russian oil delivered by sea, the French presidency to the Council of the European Union has announced.

"This ban, combined with state-level decisions taken by Germany and Poland, will reduce Russian oil imports by 92 percent by the end of the year", the presidency's official Twitter account tweeted Thursday. "It will be complemented in the near future by a ban on the import of Russian oil by pipeline", the presidency promised.

Confirming that the new restrictions have been signed off on by bloc members, the mission indicated that the sanctions package will be adopted by the Council by written procedure, and that the details on the restrictions would be published in full on Friday in the EU's official journal.
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Along with the maritime oil ban, the restrictions are said to include additional sanctions on the export of high-tech goods and chemicals to Russia, and additional restrictions on Russian banks' ability to use the SWIFT banking system, including by Sberbank - the country's largest bank. An unnamed Belarusian bank is also said to have been targeted.

The sanctions also ban the provision of services by European Union companies to the Russian oil sector, ban the provision of consultancy services to Russian companies, and ban "three Russian media outlets in spreading propaganda". The mission did not specify which "media outlets" it was referring to. Russian foreign-language media, including Sputnik and RT, are already effectively banned across the EU - which blocked their websites in March.

The Russian Foreign Ministry responded to the media ban later in the day Thursday, promising that new restrictions on three Russian television channels would not be left without a response from Moscow.
The French mission also indicated that the restrictions would target "members of the [Russian] security and military apparatus linked to the Bucha massacres, entities in the industrial and technological sectors linked to Russian aggression, oligarchs and Russian propaganda actors and members of their families", without providing any additional details.
Commenting on the new restrictions, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak warned that ordinary European consumers would be the ones to suffer from Brussels' economic short-sightedness.

"The decisions that the EU makes are of course motivated by politics more than anything, and not at all by economics, because European consumers will be the ones to suffer first and foremost as a result of these decisions. We see an increase in prices, not only for oil, but also for oil products. I don't rule out a large shortage of oil products in the EU", Novak said, speaking to Russia 24, a federal TV news channel, on Thursday.

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Sanctions tracking service Castellum.Ai estimates that the US and its European, Canadian, and Asian allies have slapped more than 7,800 new restrictions on Russia since it recognised the Donbass republics as sovereign nations and kicked off its military operation in Ukraine in February after weeks of escalating tensions between Kiev and the breakaways. Over 2,750 sanctions have been introduced since 2014, when the crisis in Russia-West relations began following the February 2014 Euromaidan coup.
Russian officials have taken a series of measures to try to take the sting out of the West's restrictions, pricing gas sales to unfriendly countries in rubles - thus reversing the ruble's collapse against the dollar and the euro, ramping up import substitution programmes, and making new deals with countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which have broadly refused to join the US and its allies in putting the squeeze on Moscow.
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