New EU sanctions hitting Russian gold, a major bank, a nationalist motorcycle club known as the Nightwolves and actors backing Vladimir Putin have been dismissed as insufficient by Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Approval of the EU’s seventh wave of economic sanctions by the 27 member states on Thursday morning has been lauded by the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, as a “strong signal”.
The “reinforced, prolonged EU sanctions against the Kremlin” send “a strong signal to Moscow: we will keep the pressure high for as long as it takes”, Von der Leyen tweeted.
In Kyiv, however, Ukraine’s president was withering about the incremental moves by the EU, where the central concern for politicians and officials in recent days has been the Russian threat to gas supply this winter.
“This is not enough and I am telling my partners this frankly,” Zelenskiy said in a late-night address in response to the latest round. “Russia must feel a much higher price for the war to force it to seek peace.”
The latest measures agreed in Brussels have been nicknamed the “six and a half package” owing to their limited ambition. On Monday, Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, admitted that leaders had been increasingly concerned that the bloc’s sanctions were self-harming.
“There is a big debate about are the sanctions effective, are the sanctions affecting us more than Russia,” he said. “Some European leaders have been saying that the sanctions were an error, was a mistake; well, I don’t think it was a mistake.”
Those concerns were reflected in the relatively modest set of measures, including a ban on Russian gold imports, that were agreed by written procedure on Thursday morning.
The G7, the world’s seven biggest economies, including the UK, France, Germany, and Italy, have already prohibited the imports of Russian gold but that will now be enforced across the EU.
Forty-eight individuals and nine entities have also been targeted. According to a draft paper circulated before formal approval, they include Russia’s biggest lender, SberBank, and the actors Vladimir Mashkov, who had appeared in the 2001 film Behind Enemy Lines and 2011 film Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, and Sergey Bezrukov.
Mashkov had also “performed during the propaganda rally in support for the illegal annexation of Crimea and the war against Ukraine, which took place on 18 March 2022 at Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow”, according to the leaked text.
Also on the list is Andrey Bobrowskyi, who is described as “a member of the nationalist motorcycle club Nightwolves MC and leader of the Roads for Victory branch of Nightwolves MC”.
The EU claims that Bobrowskyi “organised several Nightwolves rallies in Berlin, Poland and Russia” in support of Putin’s war in Ukraine.
The full details of the sanction measures will be published this week in the EU’s official journal. In addition to the restrictive measures, the EU also decided to grant €500m (£420m) in military aid to Ukraine.
