This is mainly a symbolic measure, while the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, goes to kyiv Friday. But the twenty-seven will not be able to avoid the debate on additional penalties on gas and oil.
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Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, did not want to arrive empty hands in kyiv, Friday, April 8, where she had to meet the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. “By a happy chance,” commented a diplomat, the information led to, Thursday, that the Community Executive would make his opinion in June on the admissibility of kyiv’s application to join the European Union (EU). In clear, the Commission will then decide whether Ukraine may be, or not, officially candidate.
Where ordinarily he needs between fifteen and eighteen months, this time, the Commission, if she respects this timetable, will have barely ninety days and sent a political signal to Ukraine that his case deserves a preferential treatment. In fact, this step will only launch a proceeding to last for years, during which the country will have to align with the European standards.
More concretely, Ursula von der Leyen will be able to avail himself with the Ukrainian President of the fifth packet of sanctions that the twenty-seven adopted, unanimously, in the evening of Thursday. They first decided on an embargo on Russian coal, a politically symbolic measure because it is the first one that concerns energy and there are still fifteen days ago, it was uncomfortable. But that “does not really weaken the Russian economy,” Judge Simone Tagliapietra, the Bruegel Reflection Center. “Europeans pay 15 million euros a day to buy Russian coal. For Russian gas and oil, it’s 850 million,” the researcher argos.
Member States have also decided to continue to attack the Russian financial sector by ending transactions with four of its large banks. They will also prohibit Russian ships (except those who carry agricultural and food products, humanitarian and energy aid) access to EU ports and close their borders to Russian and Belarus trucks.
Delicate exercise
On the other hand, in order to weaken its industrial base, the Europeans will no longer export to Russia some strategic goods, such as quantum computers or semiconductors. They thus deprive themselves of 10 billion euros of annual revenue, a little more than 10% of their exports to Russia. The twenty-seven had already stopped selling their luxury products, renouncing 3.5 billion a year.
On purchases of Russian goods, things are less simple, both Europeans multiplied the dependencies with regard to Moscow. While in 2021 they spent 159 billion euros on imports from Russia, they decided on Thursday to no longer buy wood, cement, caviar and vodka (for 5.5 billion euros. per year). In recent weeks, they had also ceased to import some steel products for an annual amount of 3.3 billion.
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