Its main “innovation” was the so-called secondary sanctions – they target companies from third countries that re-export European products and dual-use technologies to Russia. According to diplomats, the list attached to the new sanctions package will include companies from China, the United Arab Emirates and Uzbekistan. The list has not yet been disclosed, but it is already known that out of the eight Chinese companies that originally appeared on it, only three remained in the end, and these, according to the media, are not Chinese. , but Russians operating in China. .
The list was shortened about a week ago following negotiations between Brussels and Beijing. The EU justified its decision by saying that China had promised to stop the re-export of sanctioned goods to Russia.
But China’s representative to the EU, Fu Cong, said Beijing has not taken on any such obligations. He called the EU’s allegations unsubstantiated and promised retaliatory action if Chinese companies remain on the list.
The new package allows, as a last resort, the possibility of introducing secondary sanctions not only against individual companies, but also against entire countries. In this case, the European Union could, for example, completely ban the export of its dual-use products to these countries. But according to Euobserver, during the negotiation process, this tool has undergone such changes that it is now “virtually impossible to activate”. The changes were led by Germany and several other EU countries, fearing secondary sanctions could spoil their diplomatic and trade relations with third countries.
However, weakened or not, the secondary sanctions mechanism remained in the package, which in itself represents a major shift in EU sanctions policy. So far, only the United States has applied secondary sanctions. The European Union deemed them illegal under international law and even banned its companies from obeying Washington’s sanctions demands. However, faced with the circumvention of its own sanctions, Brussels seems unable to come up with anything new and has followed the lead of the Americans, but with all the reluctance characteristic of EU foreign policy.
Another reason for the prolonged negotiations on the 11th package was the position of Greece and Hungary. They blocked the document, demanding that Greek shipping companies and Hungary’s biggest OTP bank be excluded from Ukraine’s “blacklist”. In itself, the inclusion in this list, if it entails consequences, then only images. Nevertheless, Greece and Hungary refused to agree on a package until the issue was resolved. At the same time, the Hungarian Foreign Ministry has also proposed the exclusion of OTP Bank from the Ukrainian list as a condition for Budapest’s approval of a new EU military assistance package to Kiev from an amount of 500 million euros.
Suddenly, under pressure from Brussels, Kyiv made concessions. On Tuesday evening, Greek shipping companies were temporarily excluded from the list, allowing Athens to lift the veto. Finally, the issue should be resolved during negotiations between the Ukrainian side and the European Commission. The Hungarian bank, however, remained on the list, but on Wednesday, after Athens, the package was accepted by Budapest. Complaints against Ukraine, however, did not disappear – Hungarian representatives promised to raise the issue of OTP Bank’s exclusion from the list again when agreeing on a package of military assistance to Kiev.
It is possible that Budapest simply did not dare to block the sanctions package without Greece on its own and left the banking argument until the next round of military-financial negotiations. Moreover, some Hungarian journalists suggest that during the negotiations on the package, Hungary has already obtained the concessions it wants – in the form of the exclusion of Chinese companies from the EU’s secondary sanctions list.
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