EU extends Ukraine war sanctions on Russian officials for six months
The European Union has extended sanctions against Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, for another six months.
EU countries on Friday agreed to prolong sanctions against more than 2,500 Russian individuals and entities over the Ukraine war.
Ambassadors from the bloc’s 27 member states signed off on the move ahead of a deadline on Monday, after Hungary and Slovakia dropped requests to take a number of people off the blacklist, diplomats said.
“We just extended our sanctions on Russia,” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas wrote on X on Friday.
She said Brussels was currently finalizing work on a new package of sanctions “looking into additional curbs on Russian oil sales, shadow oil tankers, and banks.”
“We’ll keep choking off the cash for Putin’s war,” Kallas wrote.
Extending the sanctions, which have usually been a routine since March 2014, were scheduled to lapse next week if no deal was found.
Moscow-friendly Hungary and Slovakia have been regularly pushing for the removal of some of the Russian individuals from the individual sanctions blacklist envisaging immobilization of assets and restrictions on entering the EU territory for persons and legal entities, whose activity, in the opinion of the EU, is “undermining the country’s [Ukraine’s] sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump, who had repeatedly said during the 2024 election campaign that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in less than a day if he wanted to, has been pushing the EU countries to increase their military spending.
Trump has pressed the EU countries to buy arms and munitions from the United States under the pretext of boosting the NATO forces to defend them against Russian troops.
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