The EU is delaying a Russian oil ban, as the Iran war aggravates old frictions in European politics.
The European Commission will no longer put forward a legal proposal to ban all Russian oil imports on 15 April as planned, it told press in Brussels on Tuesday (24 March).
The commission said it might come out after the Easter break instead, without giving a new date, but warned against sensationalising the delay, as a nervous oil market looked for signs of how the Iran war-linked energy crisis was being seen.
It would still be a “strategic blunder” to resume Russian oil-buying, a commission spokeswoman said, while pledging new measures to ban Russian nuclear energy imports as well later this year.
Russia-neighbouring EU states have been calling for tougher energy sanctions for the past four years of full-blown Russian warfare in Ukraine and hybrid war on wider Europe.
But the oil-ban delay was grist to the mill of pro-Moscow prime minister Viktor Orbán’s re-election campaign for 12 April in Hungary, who has vetoed new sanctions on Russia’s ‘shadow fleet’ of oil tankers and said the EU should drop old ones due to the Iran crisis.