Overview
- Talks in Brussels remained deadlocked Tuesday with hours to go before a midnight deadline to renew sanctions on roughly 3,000 people and organisations.
- Diplomats circulated a compromise to extend the full package for 36 months in return for delisting Usmanov and Fridman, but Latvia publicly blocked that deal and refused to accept the delistings.
- France and Slovakia pushed to remove Usmanov, with reporting linking Paris’s stance to an opaque national‑security rationale and possible leverage over detained French citizens in Azerbaijan, while Luxembourg conditioned removing Fridman on Usmanov also being delisted because of pending legal claims.
- Ukraine and several Baltic states strongly opposed any delisting, arguing that removing high‑profile oligarchs would send a damaging signal to Moscow and weaken the EU’s stance on the war.
- If unanimity is not reached the sanctions package risks lapsing, which would remove the EU’s current legal basis for asset freezes and travel bans and could encourage more court challenges to the bloc’s sanctions regime.