Sweden opens EU debate on Ukraine sanctions

BRUSSELS - Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt has broken the EU’s silence on potential sanctions on Ukraine.

Going into an EU foreign ministers’ meeting in Brussels on Monday, he told press: “I wouldn’t exclude it … We’ll have to see what happens.”

Half-way through the talks, he tweeted: “EU must start looking at effective instruments against corrupt actors manoeuvering also in the dark corners of the politics of Ukraine.”

He told press after the meeting: “I think we should look towards various instruments targeted against corrupt money [in Ukraine].”

Swedish diplomats declined to give more details.

But an EU source noted “there was some discussion on sanctions, some countries raised the subject” at the ministers’ lunchtime debate - the first time the issue has come up in EU talks since Ukraine began its crackdown on protesters.

EU ministers on Monday also urged Ukraine to “reverse” new laws which criminalise the opposition movement.

But they added that the Union is still happy to sign a political association and free trade treaty with Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych if he wants to.

For his part, Germany’s new foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, voiced pessimism on the EU offer.

“We have to protect ourselves from the illusion that this will change the situation in the short term,” he said on Monday.

But he indicated the EU is unlikely to alter its policy until after Ukraine elections in early 2015: “For now, Ukraine has decided. We’ll have to see if after the presidential elections there can be a change.”

Meanwhile, Bildt’s remarks do not come out of the blue.

The US has already put Ukrainian interior minister Vitaliy Zakharchenko and up to 20 other officials on a draft sanctions list.

Ukrainian protesters on Monday picketed the EU embassy in Kiev to call for action.

The main opposition party, Batkivshchyna, is also circulating detailed allegations on “corrupt actors” in Yanukovych’s inner circle who use Austrian and British firms to launder money.

A senior government source from another EU state told EUobserver that indivudual EU countries could impose unilateral measures pending an EU-level accord.

“You can have national blacklists based on purely national decisions,” the contact said.

They added: “It would be difficult to target oligarchs because, even in the national systems, you need to say why such and such a person is on the list and this could not be a purely political argument. I think, first of all, you would target officials responsible for the use of force.”

The question of who to target is also being discussed by Ukrainian analysts.

Volodomyr Yermolenko, a researcher at the Internews-Ukraine think tank in Kiev, told this website on Monday the EU should first go after people who sponsored last week’s anti-protest laws.

He named Zakharchenko and five “hawk” MPs from Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions (PoR) - Yefremov, Kolesnichenko, Tsariov, Oliynyk, and Chechetov.

He noted that it could go after pro-Yanukovych oligarchs, such as Rinat Akhemtov, and their “favourite ‘toys’,” - Ukraine’s football clubs - in a second wave of measures: “Shakhtar and Metallist can be banned from EU-wide cups, for example.”

“An indicative list of other people (‘next round’ of the sanctions), including other PoR MPs and officials, should be handed to the Party of the Regions with a clear message: If today's actions continue, the list of people under sanctions will significantly enlarge,” Yermolenko said.

“These people understand only the language of force, therefore, a clever ‘if, then’ game should be played,” he added.

Amid the EU foreign ministers' focus on the Central African Republic, Iran and Syria on Monday, a Polish centre-right MEP, Krzysztof Lisek i, said: "It's a bit disappointing the ministers, relatively speaking, paid so little attention to matters in Europe. If we cannot make a positive contribution to a crisis within our immediate neighbourhood, then the EU's credibility as a foreign policy actor is in doubt."