EU countries failed again to agree on an 11th package of sanctions against Russia in talks Wednesday, with negotiations expected to continue next week, four diplomats with direct knowledge of the situation have told European media.
The United States has accused five countries – Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Turkiye and the United Arab Emirates, of being particular egregious violators of the West’s sanctions policy against Moscow.
On Wednesday, State Department sanctions coordinator Jim O’Brien complained that European companies have sold vast quantities of goods to third parties which then resold them to Russia, enabling Moscow to “reimport certain key categories of electronics at about pre-war levels.”
Sanctions Blunted
The EU’s anti-circumvention restrictions resemble the ‘secondary sanctions’ regularly used by the United States, which threatens to target third countries doing business with America’s adversaries. Washington used such sanctions for decades against countries like Iran, Cuba and North Korea. However, the restrictions faltered last year after being applied against Russia, not only failing to achieve their goal of collapsing the Russian economy, but prompting most of the world outside the US and Europe to reject efforts to isolate Russia.
The negotiations on the EU’s 11th package of sanctions comes after the approval of the 10th package in February, with those restrictions including entry bans, export bans, and asset freezes.
The European Union has now slapped over 1,500 sanctions on Russia since February 2022. Russia is by far the most heavily-sanctioned nation on Earth, with its 13,260+ total restrictions more numerous than all Western sanctions on Iran, Syria, North Korea, Belarus, Venezuela and Myanmar combined.
But the sanctions have largely failed to achieve their objective, with Russia’s GDP resuming growth in 2023 after a 2.5 percent contraction in 2022, and Moscow working intensively to expand trade ties with China, India, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America after being frozen out of Western markets.
Meanwhile, European nations have faced recession and the threat of deindustrialization amid rising energy and food prices after a halt in imports of Russian oil, gas, coal and fertilizers left many industries uncompetitive against Asian and US counterparts.
Russia warned about precisely such an eventuality in the spring of 2022, when President Putin cautioned his EU counterparts that restrictions on Russian energy purchases at Washington’s behest would constitute a form of "economic suicide."