EU Set To Extend Sanctions Against Russia By Another Six Months
BRUSSELS -- A senior EU official has told RFE/RL that the European Union is set to officially extend economic sanctions against Russia by another six months when EU ambassadors meet on December 21.
The extension would keep sanctions in place against Russia’s financial, oil, and military sectors as well as against specific individuals until July 31, 2016.
A motion to extend the sanctions during a December 14 meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels was blocked last week when Italy called for debate at a higher political level.
It was thought that Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi could raise the issue when EU leaders meet later this week.
The sanctions were first imposed in July and September 2014 in response to the illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula by the Kremlin and Moscow’s support for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Without an extension, the EU’s existing sanctions are due to expire on January 31, 2016.
That concludes our live-blogging of the Ukraine crisis for Monday, December 14. Check back here tomorrow for more of our continuing coverage.
Kerry Begins Talks In Moscow On Syria, Ukraine
By RFE/RL
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has begun meetings in Moscow expected to touch on efforts for a political transition to end Syria's civil war and implementation of a peace deal in eastern Ukraine.
Kerry has started talks with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and will meet with President Vladimir Putin later on December 15.
The visit by the top U.S. diplomat comes ahead of a planned third round of Syria talks between world powers on December 18 in New York.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement issued late on December 14 that Kerry and Lavrov spoke by phone earlier in the day and agreed on the need for specific preconditions to be met before any new meeting, casting doubt on the timing of the planned New York meeting.
U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters in Washington the same day, however, that Kerry was traveling to Moscow "with the expectation that there are no preconditions to having this meeting."
The United States and its allies insist that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad cannot stay in power as part of a political resolution to the nearly 5-year-old civil war in Syria, where government forces are fighting both Islamic State (IS) militants and moderate opposition groups -- some backed by the U.S.-led coalition.
Russia rejects that position, saying it should be up to the Syrian people to choose their leader and that Assad's army is the force most capable of defeating IS fighters that control areas of Syria and Iraq.
At the start of his meeting with Lavrov in Moscow, Kerry said Washington and Moscow agree that IS "is a threat to everybody, to every country. They are the worst of terrorists. They attack culture and history and all decency."
Celeste Wallander, senior director for Russia and Central Asia on U.S. President Barack Obama’s National Security Council, told RFE/RL ahead of Kerry's talks with Putin that while the two sides' positions on Assad may not have "come closer," Washington sees the possibility of Russia's position "evolving such that we could agree."
"It's clear that there could be an agreement on a transition that meets U.S. and coalition requirements that Assad not be part of Syria's leadership, and those are the discussions that are under intensive focus right now," Wallander said in a December 11 interview.
A senior State Department official told reporters that "we don't have a full meeting of the minds yet" concerning Assad's future.
"We will talk about some of the details of a transition...in the hopes of narrowing the differences between us," Reuters quoted the unidentified official as saying on December 14.
The Associated Press cited an unidentified U.S. diplomat in Paris as saying that Russian and U.S. diplomats held a December 11 meeting primarily aimed at clearing up Russian "grievances" ahead of Kerry's meeting with Putin.
A meeting in Saudi Arabia last week agreed to unite several Syrian opposition groups, excluding IS militants, to negotiate with Assad's government in peace talks.
While Kerry said "kinks" still needed to be worked out on the plan to unite the Syrian opposition groups, the Kremlin rejected the outcome of the Riyadh meeting, saying it did not have the right to speak on behalf of the entire Syrian opposition.
Kerry arrived in Moscow from Paris, where he met with counterparts from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Jordan to prepare for his talks with Putin and Lavrov.
Kerry and Putin are also set to discuss the implementation of the Minsk cease-fire accords, signed in February in the Belarusian capital, to halt violence between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine that the UN says has killed more than 9,000 people since April 2014.
"We're going to talk very extensively and very carefully about what's needed to implement the Minsk agreements," Wallander told RFE/RL last week.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters in Washington on December 14 that Kerry will also encourage continued efforts by Russia to ease tensions with Turkey after Ankara shot down a Russian military plane near the Syrian border on November 24.
Kerry's trip is his second to Russia this year. He and Putin met in May in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. But it is the first since Russia launched a bombing campaign targeting armed groups fighting Assad in what Moscow has framed as a counterterrorist campaign.
The United States and its allies have accused Russia of bombing the moderate Syrian opposition and using its military intervention to prop up Assad rather than targeting IS positions -- criticism that Russia has rejected.
Obama has seen Putin briefly twice -- at international summits in Turkey and France -- since Russia began its air campaign in Syria in late September.