KYIV. UkraineGate .19 . October .2022 | Ukraine News .
The EU plans to impose sanctions on several Iranian individuals and legal entities for selling weapons to Russia in the coming days, politico Brussels Playbook reports, citing four officials and diplomats .
Details
The move appears to have come amid reports that Russia has used Iranian drones to launch strikes on civilian targets in Ukraine and may soon receive Iranian precision missiles.
According to U.S. intelligence cited by the New York Times, Tehran also sent drone instructors to Russian-occupied Crimea.
According to officials and diplomats, the new sanctions package will affect five Iranian individuals and three legal entities. The new sanctions will be added to the sanctions already agreed on Monday against Iran’s “morality police” for brutally harassing and killing Iranians protesting the government.
Diplomats from EU countries can agree on the details of the new package as early as Wednesday, ahead of the upcoming European Council summit on Thursday and Friday, the publication notes.
The sanctions would be another major obstacle to negotiations to reopen the Iran Nuclear Deal (JCPOA), which lifted many U.S. sanctions on Tehran in exchange for limiting its nuclear program. Negotiators have been working to reopen the 2015 nuclear deal after then-US President Donald Trump abandoned it in 2018.
“Sincerely, JCPOA no longer counts,” one senior European official told Brussels Playbook. “We’re used to thinking it won’t get off the ground.”
Supplement
since about mid-September, Russia has been conducting attacks in Ukraine using kamikaze drones, which, according to the Ukrainian military, are Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones, which the Russian occupiers mark as “Geran-2”. On September 23, an Iranian-made Mohajer-6 multipurpose strike drone was shot down for the first time.
In the last week alone, Russia has launched more than a hundred strikes by Iranian kamikaze drones on residential buildings, power plants, sewage treatment plants, bridges and playgrounds in a number of Ukrainian cities. Dozens of people were killed and injured, including children. One-third of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure suffered. The buildings of two diplomatic missions in Kyiv were damaged, the Foreign Ministry said.
Due to Iran’s supply of weapons to Russia for warfare, Ukrainian side decided to deprive the Iranian Ambassador to Ukraine of accreditation and significantly reduce the number of diplomatic staff of the embassy in Kyiv.
After that, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba appealed to the EU to impose sanctions against Iran for supplying Russia with weapons.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine officially indicated that the provision of weapons for the war of conquest in Ukraine and the killing of Ukrainian citizens makes Iran complicit in Russian war crimes.
Iran has denied several times this month that it is supplying weapons to Russia.
Source: Ukrgate
