European Union leaders are set to call for new sanctions targeting Belarus, North Korea, and Iran over their alleged role in assisting Russia’s war efforts against Ukraine.
The White House said in January it had evidence that North Korea had provided ballistic missiles to Russia while Pyongyang was expecting to receive military hardware from Russia. North Korea supplies Russia with a full range of artillery ammo, including gun and mortar shells. Iran has reportedly also supplied Russia with a significant quantity of potent surface-to-surface ballistic missiles.
According to draft conclusions of the upcoming March 21-22 leaders’ summit seen by Bloomberg, the EU will aim to “restrict Russia’s access to sensitive items and technologies with battlefield relevance.” This includes “targeting entities in third countries enabling this illicit trade,” the draft conclusions state.
The proposed measures come as the EU approved the latest package of sanctions in February, its 13th since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These latest measures aimed to blacklist Russian drone producers and global procurement networks supplying components to Moscow’s military
The leaders’ summit will also discuss progress on how to utilize frozen Russian central bank assets. Western nations have frozen about €260 billion ($284 billion) in securities and cash, more than two-thirds of it in the European Union.
The European Union also planned to unlock up to €3 billion in funding for Ukraine this year by seizing profits from frozen Russian assets held by the Brussels-based securities depository Euroclear.
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