The European Union’s ambassador to Ukraine says it’s time for the EU and the United States to force Russia to engage in peace talks with tough new transatlantic sanctions, following Moscow’s deadly overnight bombardment of Kyiv.
Russia unleashed a wave of missiles and drones on the Ukrainian capital early Thursday that killed at least a dozen people and damaged residential and office buildings, including those housing the EU and British delegations. No EU staff were injured.
Katarína Mathernová, the EU’s top diplomat in Kyiv, said on Thursday that the assault “flies in the face” of Moscow’s official line that it is open to negotiating an end to the conflict, which it launched more than three years ago.
“Everybody sarcastically refers to the attack as Russian peace, Russian-style peace,” she told POLITICO in a phone interview. “Nobody believes that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is committed to peace.”
Mathernová added that the EU and the U.S. need to work together to “pressure” the Kremlin to sit down at the negotiating table “in a transatlantic way,” calling for joint sanctions to squeeze Russia’s economy and empty Putin’s war chest.
“I think that any sanctions work better if they come from different parts of the democratic world,” she said. “The move by the EU to include the shadow fleet, expand the listings, et cetera, I think actually is biting, but we need to keep at it.”
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen earlier this month announced that the EU will unveil its 19th package of sanctions against Russia, which is designed “to bring President Putin to the negotiation table,” in early September.
The EU has already taken aim at the Kremlin’s energy exports, infrastructure and financial institutions, but has resisted more severe measures, such as seizing Russia’s frozen assets, including €210 billion sitting in the Brussels-based Euroclear securities depository.
Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump last week set a two-week deadline for Putin to end his invasion of Ukraine or else face “massive sanctions or massive tariffs or both.”
The Republican leader this week hit India with steep 50 percent tariffs as punishment for buying Russian oil — though that pales in comparison to the 500 percent tariffs proposed by U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham on Moscow’s trading partners, which the White House has yet to back.
So far, Moscow hasn’t offered any concessions for a peace deal. On the contrary, Putin has refused to back down from his maximalist demands, including that Kyiv give up vast, heavily fortified swaths of land in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region and commit to staying out of NATO.
“I don’t think we should be waiting for Russia to get interested,” Mathernová said. “I think we need to put pressure on Russia to be interested in these talks.”
The seasoned diplomat from Slovakia said that von der Leyen had personally called her to express support for Mathernová and her staff after the attack on the EU delegation building.
“People are freaked out,” Mathernová said. “This is true both for expats and for local staff, because one thing is to live here during the war and be woken up by sirens and hear the blasts, but it’s quite another thing when it hits you this close to home.”
But, she stressed: “What I want to make very clear is that we are in Ukraine. We are there. We are with Ukraine. We are not going anywhere.”
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