EU prepares to sanction four Russians over Navalny
BRUSSELS: European Union foreign ministers agreed on Monday to prepare sanctions on four senior Russian officials close to President Vladimir Putin in a mainly symbolic response to the jailing of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, three EU diplomats said.
The political agreement, which is expected to be formally approved by the EU in March, came after France, Germany, Poland and the Baltic states urged the 27-member bloc to send a message to Putin that debate and protest must be allowed in Russia.
Navalny was arrested after returning to Moscow last month from Germany, where he had been recovering from a nearfatal poisoning in August with what Western nations said was a nerve agent. His arrest sparked nationwide street protests in Russia.
No names were discussed at Monday’s EU meeting, but one diplomat said the proposed new travel bans and asset freezes would target, among others, Alexander Bastrykin, whose Investigative Committee handles probes into major crimes and reports directly to Putin.
Bastrykin is already under
British human rights sanctions.
Also to be targeted, the diplomat said, is Igor Krasnov, who became Russia’s prosecutorgeneral a year ago in a move seen as giving Putin greater scope to retain influence once his presidential term expires in 2024.
The third official on the draft list is Viktor Zolotov, head of Russia’s National Guard, who publicly threatened Navalny with violence in September 2018. The fourth man named by the diplomat is Alexander Kalashnikov, head of the federal prison service.
The sanctions are set to be imposed under a new framework that allows the EU to take measures against human rights violators worldwide.
Separately the EU has already sanctioned six Russians and a state scientific research centre in response to the August poisoning of Navalny.
The proposed new listings fall well short of the demands made by Navalny’s allies, who have drawn up a list of 35 people including members of Russia’s business elite — the so-called oligarchs — they want to see targeted.
EU governments say sanctions against senior state officials can better withstand legal challenges, while it is more difficult to prove business executives’ involvement in any human rights abuses.
Before the EU meeting, Leonid Volkov, a senior Navalny aide, said in Brussels that sanctions against oligarchs might be a way to weaken Putin if they came to feel that association with the president was more of a liability than a source of protection.
But Volkov welcomed Monday’s decision: “Even if it’s too little... it’s the first time personal sanctions are applied with regard to human rights violations, so it opens a way for further negotiation on this with Europe.”
It took seven years from the summer’s day in 2008 when a top US diplomat first sat down with his Iranian counterpart until the two sides sealed the 2015 Iran nuclear deal that aimed to keep Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
No one expects it to take as long to establish whether they can resuscitate the pact abandoned by former US President Donald Trump, but US and European officials say the journey will be lengthy and arduous, if, indeed, they even begin the trek.
US President Joe Biden’s administration said last Thursday that it was ready send to its special envoy, Rob Malley, to meet Iranian officials and seek a path back to the deal, agreed by Tehran and six major powers and named the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). While Tehran sent mixed signals at first, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif took a hard line on Sunday, saying: “The US will not be able to rejoin the nuclear pact before it lifts sanctions.”
The crux of the deal was that Iran would limit its uranium enrichment programme to make it harder to amass the fissile material for a nuclear weapon — an ambition it has long denied — in return for relief from US and other economic sanctions. In theory, it should not be hard to decide how to revive an agreement whose terms are detailed in 110 pages of text and annexes. In reality, it will be a challenge for two reasons: the scores of sanctions that Trump imposed on Iran after walking away from the deal in May 2018 and the steps Iran took, after waiting more than a year, to violate the pact in retaliation.
While both sides have so far focused in public on the question of who moves first to revive the deal — each insists that the other must do so — a US official said the “sequencing” could be finessed.
“The issue of who goes first ... I don’t think it’s the one that’s going to be the most difficult,” he said. “It’s defining how each side views compliance,” the official added, citing instead which US sanctions might be lifted and “the question of ... the steps that Iran has taken, are they all reversible?”
The JCPOA, hammered out by Iran, Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States, required the United States to remove only “nuclear-related” sanctions on Iran.
Experts say Biden would find it politically fraught, and maybe impossible, to meet Tehran’s demands that these be lifted given the likely criticism from Republicans.
The issue of who goes first... I don’t think it’s the one that’s going to be the most difficult. It’s defining how each side views compliance...
US OFFICIAL