RUSSIA: EU Prolongs Economic Sanctions by Six Months

Friday July 6 2018

On 5 July 2018, the Council decided to extend economic sanctions targeting the financial, energy and defence sectors, and the area of dual-use goods.  These sanctions where originally introduced in 2014 for the duration of a year as a retort to Russia’s destabilizing involvement in Ukraine.

These sanctions aim to:

• limit access to EU capital markets towards five of the major Russian state owned financial institutions and their majority owned subsidiaries. This access has also been limited to major Russian energy and defence companies.
• Impose a ban on imported and exported arm trades.
• Impose an export ban for dual-use goods for military use or military end users in Russia;
• curtail Russian access to certain sensitive technologies and services  that can be used for oil production and exploration.

The duration of the sanctions was linked to the complete implementation of the Minsk agreements by the European Council on 19 March 2015, which was foreseen to take place by 31 December 2015. Since this did not happen, the sanctions have remained in place.

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