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The sanctions should be formally adopted in the next few days.
Two European diplomats told the AFP news agency that the sanctions will be directed against the main sources of income for the authoritarian regime of President Alexander Lukashenko, including fertilizer exports and the petrochemical industry.
The foreign ministers of the member states of the European Union also approved the fourth package of sanctions against Belarus.
It was decided to freeze the property and not to issue visas to 78 natural persons and 8 legal entities in Belarus. Businessmen, members of Aliaksandr Lukashenko’s family, prosecutors, rectors of academic institutions, judges, high-ranking military officials and others were blacklisted.
Seven of the new sanctions will be directly related to the landing of a Ryanair liner in Minsk. Others are being prosecuted for the regime’s large-scale crackdown on the opposition, diplomats said.
“We will continue to follow the path of sanctions against Lukashenko and his regime. We will not only impose sanctions on people, but now we will also impose sanctions on sectors,” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said before the meeting.
“In this way we want to contribute to the depletion of the regime’s finances,” he added.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell previously said the sanctions should be finally adopted after a community summit later this week in Brussels.
“The sanctions are a way of putting pressure on the Belarusian government,” Borrell told reporters. “We are determined to have a very severe impact on the Belarusian economy.”
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas on Monday called for broad economic sanctions against Belarus.
The minister made this call before the meeting of the heads of diplomacy of the European Union countries, where additional criminal measures were discussed for the Minsk regime for the crash landing of passenger airline Ryanair last month.
“I think additional sanctions against Belarus are inevitable,” Maas told Die Welt.
“We must impose sanctions in certain areas of the Belarusian economy, such as the potash fertilizer industry or the energy sector. We must deprive the Minsk regime of access to funds for the distribution of bonds in the European Union,” he said.
EU foreign ministers will meet in Luxembourg on Monday to discuss sectoral sanctions on Belarus.
New sanctions targeting key sectors of the Belarusian economy are being considered, including exports of potash fertilizers, the tobacco sector, oil and petrochemicals.
Ministers meeting in Luxembourg are discussing comprehensive measures against the “wallet” of authoritarian President Aliaksandr Lukashenko’s regime, a European diplomat told AFP news agency on Friday.
“We are talking about sanctions that will be painful,” added the diplomat.
According to diplomats, restrictions on the export of weapons and equipment that could be used to suppress protesters should also be tightened.
Sector sanctions are being considered following an incident in May in which a Ryanair plane carrying more than a hundred passengers from Athens to Vilnius was forcibly landed in Minsk after Belarusian controllers informed it of the suspected explosive, although this information was not confirmed later.
To take over the ocean liner, the Minsk regime had sent a fighter jet.
Raman Pratasevičius, an opposition blogger, and his friend Sofia Sapega, a Russian citizen studying in Vilnius, were detained as the plane landed in the Belarusian capital.
As a result of the incident, EU countries closed their airspace to Belarusian planes and asked airlines to stop flying over the country.
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