EU to extend sanctions against Russians and Ukrainian rebels

The EU is Wednesday (2 September) expected to extend sanctions against Russian and Ukrainian individuals and firms by six months.

Some 150 people and 37 firms will continue to have their assets frozen and be under a travel ban until March 2016, when sanctions will be reviewed again.

The sanctions, which the EU has decided in several stages since April 2014, target individuals and firms associated with the Russian authorities and the pro-Russian leadership in Ukraine, and who contributed to the annexation of Crimea by Russia and separatist activities in eastern Ukraine.

These targeted sanctions go along with sanctions against Russia's banking, arms and energy sector, which were rolled over last June, until the end of January.

Among the people subject to sanctions are Igor Sechin and Vladislav Surkov, advisers to president Vladimir Putin i, as well as deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin and Russian MPs. The list also includes Crimea's PM Sergei Aksionov and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.

The extension of the individual set of sanctions comes as the situation in Ukraine remains very tense after heavy fighting between separatist forces and the Ukrainian army in the Donbass region in August.

Meeting

Last week, after a meeting with Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko i and France's Francois Hollande i, German chancellor Angela Merkel i said that the Minsk agreement signed with Russia in February "hasn't been fully implemented and that's meant that there have been more and more victims".

EU Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker i, who met Poroshenko three days later, said that both sides in Ukraine should implement the Minsk agreement. But he added he "address[ed] this especially to Russia”.

On Tuesday, Russia's foreign affairs minister Lavrov said his country was prepared for the "twists" of the West.

"We are paying attention to sanctions only from the stance that we, inside our country, would be ready for all such twists of our Western partners, to be independent from them in the spheres, which are vitally important for our country, for our citizens," he told students of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.

Merkel, Hollande and Putin held a phone call on Saturday and agreed that a meeting "in the coming weeks" would be "useful".