EU Parliament Passes Resolution Proposing Anti-Russia Sanctions in Case of ‘Ukraine Invasion’

The measure, tabled by MPs hailing from Poland, the Baltic states and Romania, passed Thursday with 569 of the legislature’s 705 members voting in favour, while 67 opposed, and 46 abstained.

Along with threatening to disconnect Russia from the SWIFT payment system and completely halt the purchase of Russian oil and gas, the resolution 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 cancelled if Moscow invaded its western neighbor.

A five page draft of the resolution put out on the European Parliament’s website a day earlier accused Moscow of a wide array of evildoing going back to the early 2000s, from “human rights abuses” and the jailing of opposition vlogger Alexei Navalny to corruption and an alleged “internal war on its own people” by the Kremlin via “the systematic oppression of the opposition,” to the Skripal incident, 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” behaviour 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 blames Russia for the Ukraine conflict, 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 Kiev which eventually led to Crimea’s referendum to split off from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, a bloody civil war in the country’s east, and the collapse of centuries of close ties between Kiev and Moscow.