EU Parliament Drafts New Sanctions on Russia Over Ukraine

The European Parliament in Brussels has passed a resolution threatening to implement a number of tough anti-Russian measures in case Russia "invades" Ukraine.

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The measure was introduced by MEPs hailing from Poland, the Baltic states, and Romania, and was passed on Thursday with 569 votes in favor, 67 opposed, and 46 abstentions, out of the 705 members.

Among the measures proposed, the resolution threatens to disconnect Russia from the SWIFT payment system and put a full stop to purchases of Russian oil and gas. The resolution also states that "all assets in the EU of oligarchs close to the Russian authorities and their families in the EU" would be frozen and their visas canceled if Moscow invaded its western neighbor.

The European Parliament`s website made available a five-page draft of the resolution a day earlier in which it accused Moscow of a wide array of evildoing going back to the early 2000s, from "human rights abuses" and the jailing of opposition blogger Alexei Navalny to corruption and an alleged "internal war on its own people" by the Kremlin via "the systematic oppression of the opposition."

The Skrpial incident is also mentioned, so too election meddling, "propaganda and disinformation in the Russian press and its malicious spread to the EU," a host of "destabilizing and subversive actions in Europe," and even "aggressive" behavior by the Russian military while maneuvering inside its own borders. Moscow is also blamed for the 2014 explosions at a Czech arms depot.

While it places all responsibility of the Ukraine conflict on Russia, the resolution makes no mention of the EU's role in assisting the United States in instigating the Ukraine crisis in late 2013 and early 2014, nor the February 2014 coup d'etat in Kyiv, which eventually led to Crimea's referendum to split off from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, bloody civil war in the country's east, and the collapse of centuries of close ties between Kyiv and Moscow.

The resolution also calls on Russia "to implement the provisions of the Minsk Agreements" facilitating an end to the Ukrainian civil war, despite the fact that Moscow serves only as a guarantor of the 2015 treaty seeking to end the war between Kyiv and breakaway forces in the country's east by granting them broad autonomy. Moscow has long blamed Ukrainian authorities for failing to make good on their commitments under the treaty regarding autonomy, with legislators in Kyiv failing to table the necessary legislation in the Rada parliament over six years after the Minsk Agreements were signed.

In a broad-ranging interview with Sputnik on Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov pointed to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's "shameful" statements about the Minsk agreements being "useless," and rejected any attempt to renegotiate the accords, warning that doing so would lead to a massacre in the Donbas breakaways.