EU’s Juncker warns Russia on sanctions ahead of Putin meet

ST. PETERSBURG / AP

EU Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker warned Russia on Thursday that the 28-nation bloc will only lift its sanctions if the Kremlin fully implements a Ukraine peace deal.
“The next step is clear, full implementation of the agreement—no more, no less,” Juncker told Russia’s main economic forum in Saint Petersburg ahead of a meeting with President Vladimir Putin.
“This is the only way to begin our conversation and the only way to lift the economic sanctions that have been imposed.”
The Juncker-Putin meeting will be their first such encounter in Russia since the EU slapped sanctions on Moscow over Ukraine in 2014. Putin is hosting Juncker as well as Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi at the three-day conference in Russia’s second city just weeks before the expiry of EU sanctions that have helped push Russia’s economy into recession.
Putin will also sit down with UN chief Ban Ki-moon alongside the world body’s envoy on Syria Staffan de Mistura, as he seeks to recast Moscow as a more stable partner for the West and bolster his country’s flagging economy.

Battered financial sector
The EU has tied the lifting of the punishing sanctions that have battered Russia’s financial sector to the implementation of a deal brokered by the leaders of France and Germany in Minsk in February 2015 to end the pro-Russian uprising in east Ukraine.
But the accord has stalled as the violence—that Kiev and the West says is masterminded by Moscow—rumbles on and despite some signs of cracks in the EU over extending the sanctions when Juncker insisted the bloc was “united”.
Diplomatic sources in Brussels told AFP Thursday that EU members could agree to renew the sanctions against Russia for six months as early as next week as they look to clear the schedule ahead of a summit at the end of the month set to be dominated by the fallout from Britain’s EU referendum.
Despite the frosty relations with Moscow, however, Juncker insisted he had come to Russia to try to improve relations.
“If our relationship today is troubled and marked by mistrust, it is not broken beyond repair. We need to mend it, and I believe we can,” he said. Putin’s top foreign policy advisor Yury Ushakov has described the Putin-Juncker encounter as “very important” and said the current difficulties between the EU and Russia would be discussed “frankly”.
Despite the worst feud between Moscow and the West since the Cold War there are a host of top European business figures at the conference that Moscow has tried to pitch as its answer to Davos.
Putin is set to oversee an important contract signing for the construction in Russia of a major liquefied gas plant with the head of Royal Dutch Shell.

Russia building
military ‘zone of
influence’: NATO

Berlin / AFP

Moscow is seeking to create a “zone of influence through military means”, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said on Thursday, adding that the alliance has observed major and aggressive manoeuvres on the Russian side.
“We are observing massive militarisation at NATO borders—in the Arctic, in the Baltic, from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea,” Stoltenberg told Germany daily Bild in an interview. “Russia is trying to build up a zone of influence through military means,” he said. “We are registering aggressive, unannounced, large-scale manoeuvres on the Russian side. Therefore we must act,” said Stoltenberg, justifying the alliance’s decision to deploy battalions to the Baltic states and Poland.
“What we are doing is defensive, we do not want to provoke conflict, rather, we want to prevent conflict. We want to show our partners that we’re there when they need us,” added the NATO secretary-general. Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and its support for separatists in Ukraine has jolted NATO out of a post-Cold War complacency and forced it to bolster its eastern flank.
NATO defence ministers on Tuesday approved sending four battalions of between 800 to 1,000 troops each to the three Baltic states and Poland.