BRUSSELS —
EU leaders on Tuesday played down the prospects of
getting a ban on Russian gas in a next round of sanctions, after struggling to
secure an already watered-down embargo on Moscow’s key oil exports.
اضافة اعلان
The 27-nation bloc agreed at a summit on Monday to a
sixth package of sanctions that will see the majority of
Russian oil stopped,
but exempted supplies by pipeline in a concession to hold-out Hungary.
The weeks of wrangling over oil rocked European
unity in the face of the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine, and cutting off major
economies like Germany from Russian gas is a far tougher ask.
“I think that the gas has to be in the seventh
package but I’m a realist as well, I don’t think it will be there,” Estonian
Prime Minister Kaja Kallas said, on the second day of a Brussels summit.
Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer warned “it was
much easier to compensate for oil”.
“With gas it is quite different. Therefore, the gas
embargo will not be an issue in the next package of sanctions either,” he
argued.
Belgian premier
Alexander De Croo said the bloc
“should pause it for now” before moving on to consider a new round of
sanctions.
“For gas, it is also way more complicated. So, this
is an important step. Let’s stop there for the moment, let’s see what the
impact is,” he said.
‘Nothing ruled out’
The head of the EU’s
executive,
Ursula von der Leyen, suggested Brussels had gone far enough for now
on hitting Russian fossil fuels and that it was time to focus more on the
“financial and the economic sector”.
“The big bulk on energy — this is up and running,”
von der Leyen said.
But
French President Emmanuel Macron said “nothing
should be ruled out”.
“No one knows how things will evolve and how the war
will evolve,” he said.
As the EU stalls over a gas ban, Russia’s state
giant Gazprom has already begun cutting off European countries that have
refused to pay for their gas in rubles.
On Monday, the Netherlands became the latest EU
nation to have the taps turned off after Finland, Bulgaria, and Poland saw
their supplies severed.
Other EU member states have given in to the
Kremlin’s demands to pay in rubles to secure a flow of deliveries which they
insist is vital to their economies.
But the refusal to cut off the vast sums heading
daily to fill the Kremlin’s coffers has fuelled criticism that the bloc is
helping to fund Moscow’s war machine.
Instead of
sanctions, EU leaders on Tuesday discussed a mammoth investment package put
forward by Brussels that should help wean
Europe off Russian gas well before
the end of the decade.
“Nobody wants to buy energy from Russia, a barbaric
country, a country that cannot be relied upon in any way, (that) has turned out
to be not only an untrustworthy partner, but also a criminal state,” Polish
Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said.
“We are discussing how to quickly move away not only
from Russian hydrocarbons such as coal or oil, but also, in the longer term, as
highlighted by some member states, especially Germany and Austria, in the
longer term, also from gas.”
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