WorldRussia-Ukraine
EU targets Russian refineries and banks in 117 new sanctions listings after Trump's diesel deal
Kaja Kallas's diplomatic service has put 12 people and 105 entities before member states, from oil plants between St Petersburg and Sakhalin to firms in the UAE accused of helping Moscow dodge curbs.
Key points
- The EU's diplomatic service has proposed 117 new listings: 12 individuals and 105 entities.
- 31 listings hit Russia's oil processing, refining and export capacity, and 52 target banks and financial firms.
- The plan comes about two weeks after Donald Trump agreed to import Russian diesel.
The European Union has drawn up 117 new sanctions listings aimed at Russia’s oil industry, its banks and the foreign companies accused of helping Moscow get round earlier restrictions, in a pointed reply to President Donald Trump’s decision to buy Russian diesel.
The European External Action Service, the bloc’s diplomatic arm, put the draft to EU ambassadors on Wednesday. It names 12 individuals and 105 entities, all of whom would face an asset freeze and a ban on transactions with anyone in the EU. In practice a listing also scares off companies in other countries that do not want trouble with Brussels.
“We see that we have to pressure the aggressor to stop the war, not the victim to surrender,” Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top diplomat, who oversees the bloc’s sanctions, has said.
From St Petersburg to Sakhalin
The heaviest blow falls on oil. Thirty-one of the listings target Russia’s capacity to process, refine and export crude, at sites spread from St Petersburg in the west to Sakhalin island in the Pacific. Ukrainian drones have spent much of the autumn hitting Russian refineries.
A further 52 listings are banks and financial institutions. Two entities that process Russian liquefied natural gas are included, as is a steel company working in occupied Donetsk.
Beyond Russia, the draft names 12 entities in the United Arab Emirates and companies in Oman, Singapore, Hong Kong and the Seychelles, all accused of helping Moscow evade existing sanctions. Fifteen more companies in Russia’s military-industrial complex would be added.
Some of the 12 individuals are linked to the online marketplaces Ozon and Wildberries, which have traded in goods useful to Russia’s armed forces, and to the search company Yandex. All three firms have been the targets of successful Ukrainian strikes.
One company outside Russia would come off the list, because it has stopped the activity that got it sanctioned and promised not to resume it.
A rift with Washington
The proposal lands about two weeks after Trump agreed to import diesel, a refined oil product, from Russia. EU leaders condemned that deal, and the wider shift in Washington’s approach to Ukraine, when they met in Brussels on 15 and 16 October.
A spokesperson for the Irish presidency of the EU Council said the listings were aimed at “targeting sectors which raise revenue for Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine”.
The move comes in a week of intense diplomacy. US envoy Steve Witkoff met Russian President Vladimir Putin in St Petersburg on Wednesday, a day after seeing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European partners in Oslo. Within hours, Russia fired waves of ballistic missiles and drones at Kyiv.
What happens next
Sanctions experts from the 27 member states will now go through the list name by name. It then returns to ambassadors for approval before ministers take a final vote. Any one member state can hold up a package, and past rounds have stalled for weeks over objections from individual capitals.