“Feels like Hungary”
Germany slows down EU sanctions against Russia
13.06.2024, 04:47
This is not the first time that Germany has irritated its EU partners with concerns about how to deal with Moscow. Brussels diplomats have hinted that the German government is delaying sanctions against Russia. There has been no explanation from the leaders of the traffic light coalition.
According to information from the German Press Agency, the German government is blocking progress in negotiations on the EU’s next package of Russia sanctions. According to diplomats in Brussels, German concerns and requests for changes are a key reason why the sanctions planning has not yet been completed. Recently, it felt as if Germany was the new Hungary, said an EU official, alluding to the fact that Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Budapest government had repeatedly delayed decisions on Russia sanctions in the past.
The planned new EU sanctions are intended in particular to combat the circumvention of existing sanctions. This means, for example, that Russia’s arms industry can still use Western technology to produce weapons for the war against Ukraine.
In addition, there are plans to impose tough EU sanctions for the first time against Russia’s billion-dollar liquefied natural gas (LNG) business. According to diplomats, the European Commission wants to prohibit ports such as the one in Zeebrugge, Belgium, from being used to ship Russian LNG to third countries. This will then lead to Russia being able to sell less liquefied natural gas and invest less money in its war of aggression due to a lack of transport capacity.
Federal government addresses liability issues
According to EU diplomats, Germany’s reservations about the plans relate primarily to measures that are intended to make it more difficult to circumvent EU sanctions. Among other things, the German government is demanding that a planned rule on the liability of company branches in the event of violations be limited to certain goods or deleted entirely. The background to this is obviously the fear that otherwise German companies could be held responsible for violations of sanctions.
In addition, the Federal Government considers certain reporting requirements to be superfluous and wants to ensure that a measure is weakened that would further restrict the use of the Russian SPFS system for the exchange of electronic messages on financial transactions.
Agreement should already be in place
It was originally planned that an agreement on the new sanctions package would be reached by the start of the G7 summit of the democratic industrial nations on Thursday. According to diplomats, however, a political agreement can now only be reached on Friday at the earliest. After a meeting of the permanent representatives of the EU states in Brussels, it was said that a large central member state had made it clear, without further explanation, that it still considered parts of the plans to be problematic. The German government initially gave no explanation for the approach.
The case of the Russia sanctions is not the first in which the German government’s behavior has met with incomprehension from partners. Most recently, for example, it prevented a new project for Ukraine from being called “NATO Mission Ukraine” (NMU) in NATO. The German government took the position that the name could be mistakenly understood as if the alliance wanted to send soldiers to Ukraine. It therefore feared that the name could be exploited by Russia for propaganda purposes and used against the alliance.
Proponents of the use of the term “mission”, however, argued that the Kremlin would condemn the NATO project as aggression and use it for disinformation campaigns. It was incomprehensible that Germany was the only country to take to the barricades because of this – especially since the German government said it was fully behind the plans. The main point of the plan is that NATO will in future take over the international coordination of arms deliveries and training activities for the Ukrainian armed forces.