The foreign ministers of the EU states want to discuss the latest developments in the Ukraine war at a meeting in Brussels this Monday. The Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba is expected to attend the talks. The EU has also invited Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly.
The meeting is overshadowed by the ongoing dispute within the EU over an import ban on Russian oil. The plans for this are currently on the brink because Hungary is not willing to support the project.
The country justifies this with its high dependence on Russian oil supplies and the high costs of switching to other suppliers. Hungary only wants to agree to an embargo if it receives billions in aid or far-reaching exemptions from the EU. However, other EU countries do not want to accept this.
The EU states’ negotiations on an oil embargo were supposed to have been completed more than a week ago. The EU Commission’s original proposal was to end imports of Russian crude oil in six months and oil products in eight months because of the Ukraine war. Hungary and Slovakia should be given 20 months. So far, offers of improvement have not been able to persuade Hungary to give up the blockade.
The Ukrainian Foreign Minister Kuleba warned the EU states on Friday that the negotiations would fail. If the planned sixth EU sanctions package were to be passed without an oil embargo, Russian President Vladimir Putin would be able to celebrate, he said on the fringes of consultations with the foreign ministers of the G7 group of large industrialized nations in Weissenhaus on the Baltic Sea. The unity of the EU would then be broken for the first time.
