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European Union governments will decide on a package of new sanctions against Russia by Friday, Italian Foreign Minister Federica Mogherini told the European Parliament on Tuesday, calling for “the strongest possible response.”
Mogherini, who will be the bloc’s next foreign policy chief, said theEuropean Commission, the EU executive arm, will present a strengthened package of sanctions against Russia over its military invasion of Ukraine by Wednesday.
EU ambassadors will meet on Thursday and Friday and the decision will be taken by Friday, Mogherini said.
“We need to respond in the strongest possible way,” Mogherini told reporters following a presentation to EU lawmakers in the European Parliament.
“Things on the ground are getting more and more dramatic. We speak about an aggression and I think sanctions are part of a political strategy,” she said. She also described the situation as “a time of complete darkness.”
Mogherini declined to give details of the sanctions package but said they would target Russia in four sectors, which include defense, dual-use goods and finance.
Gas talks
The European Commission will also hold expert-level talks with Russia on Thursday to try to solve the Ukraine gas price row, Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said on Tuesday.
The meeting is a follow-up to Oettinger’s meeting with Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak in Moscow last Friday and aims to further analyze figures on security of supply next winter. Oettinger said he would then meet Ukrainian Energy Minister Yuri Prodan in Baku, Azerbaijan, on September 8.
After this meeting, Ukraine, Russia and the Commission will agree on a date and location for the next round of trilateral gas talks, which could take place in mid-September, he said.
Meanwhile, a Ukrainian military spokesman said on Tuesday that 15 additional troops were killed in the past 24 hours in fighting with pro-Russian separatists backed by Russian troops.
Overall, U.N. agencies say about 2,600 people have died in the conflict, around 800 of them members of Ukraine’s security forces, Kyiv said.
Also on Tuesday, the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, said that more than 1 million people have been displaced by the conflict in Ukraine, including 814,000 Ukrainians now in Russia with various forms of status.
Numbers displaced inside Ukraine by the fighting have nearly doubled in the past three weeks to at least 260,000 and more are fleeing, the agency earlier told a Geneva news briefing.
“It’s safe to say you have over a million people now displaced as a result of the conflict, internally and externally together,” Vincent Cochetel, director of the UNHCR’s bureau for Europe, said on Tuesday. “I mean 260,000 in Ukraine, it’s a low estimate, 814,000 in Russia, then you add the rest … Belarus, Moldova, European Union.”
Reassure NATO countries
Mogherini, the incoming EU foreign affairs chief, also said Tuesday that NATO countries bordering Russia need reassurance that they will be defended by the alliance in the face of the spiraling Ukraine war.
Russia was also no longer a “strategic partner” for the European Union, added Mogherini, as she took questions from members of the European parliament following her nomination to the EU post on Saturday.
Mogherini, who takes office in November, was trying to reassure eastern European Union countries that had feared she may be too soft on Russia, which has allegedly sent troops in support of rebels in eastern Ukraine.
Addressing concerns whether she was “pro-Russia or anti-Russia,” Mogherini said the “real point” is how Europe supports the democratic process in Kyiv, as well as a political rather than a military solution for the war in eastern Ukraine.
Mogherini then reached out to eastern members of NATO — which include Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — that are worried by an increasingly assertive Russia over Moscow’s alleged military intervention in non-NATO Ukraine.
“All those countries in the alliance that share a border with Russia need to be sure that article five is not just a written text, (that) there are some measures that can be taken to ensure their security,” Mogherini said.
Article five of NATO’s Washington treaty calls for the alliance to come to the collective defense of any one member if it comes under attack.
NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said ahead of the Western military alliance’s two-day summit in Wales that opens on Thursday that the growing Russian threat meant the Cold War-era bloc must create a bigger presence in eastern Europe.
Efforts to join NATO blamed
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Tuesday that Ukrainian moves to seek NATO membership were aimed at undermining efforts to end the war in the east of the country.
Lavrov said last week’s move by Kyiv came shortly after a meeting of the Russian and Ukrainian leaders to seek to defuse the crisis.
“So the party of peace was trying, and is still trying, to advance a negotiated political settlement of all the fundamental questions Ukrainians face, and in Kyiv, the party of war is taking steps clearly aimed at undermining these efforts,” he told a news conference.
In other news, a Russian official said a reported comment by President Vladimir Putin that Russia could capture Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, in two weeks was taken out of context. Yuri Ushakov, a top aide to Putin, told journalists that the quote in Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper had a totally different meaning.
That newspaper reported this week that Putin had told European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso in a phone conversation that if he wanted, he could take Kyiv in two weeks.
Belarus meetings
Purgin spoke at the first round of peace talks that opened Monday in the Belarussian capital, Minsk.
Pro-Russian separatists have said they are willing to remain part of Ukraine if they are granted more autonomy.
Lavrov noted that Russian, Ukrainian and rebel officials had exchanged documents outlining their positions at talks in Belarus on Monday, and said the very fact they had met was important. More talks are due on Friday.
He said he hoped the talks in Minsk would be an example of seeking a solution through compromise, not by “imposing one’s point of view.”
Reuters
