On the 16th local time, the Economic and Financial Affairs Council of the European Union held a meeting. Ministers of Economy and Finance from 27 EU member states discussed key issues such as sanctions against Russia and bank crisis management in Brussels, Belgium.
At the meeting that day, EU countries did not reach a consensus on the 11th round of sanctions against Russia.
Vice Chairman of the European Commission, Dong Brovskis, told the outside world after the meeting that cracking down on sanctions evasion is the focus of the 11th round of sanctions against Russia. According to its introduction, the European Commission believes that the effectiveness of sanctions depends on their implementation. Currently, some countries continue to cooperate with Russia by evading sanctions, providing assistance to Russia and causing unfair competition in the EU internal market.
East Brovskis accused some Russian neighbors, especially the countries of the Eurasian economic union, of abnormal trade flows related to the sanctioned goods in their export customs data. However, according to European media reports, several major European countries, including Germany, hold a skeptical stance on sanctioning third countries to evade sanctions. Germany advocates imposing sanctions only on specific companies, rather than targeting a particular country. Some European diplomats warned that sanctions against Central Asian countries and Türkiye may be counterproductive. In order to assess the scale of enterprises evading sanctions, EU Special Envoy O'Sullivan has travelled to Türkiye, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in recent weeks to assess the scale of sanctions evading.
At the meeting that day, countries decided to strengthen administrative cooperation and prevent digital assets from being used for tax avoidance and tax fraud. The EU finance ministers also discussed proposals for bank crisis management and deposit insurance frameworks.
