BRUSSELS — European Union member countries continue to tolerate the rampant evasion of sanctions against Russia and Belarus, making it harder for front-line states to enforce the measures, Latvian Foreign Minister Baiba Braže told POLITICO.
“There’s a serious problem on how EU countries are actually implementing sanctions and exporting stuff both to Russia and to Belarus,” Braže said in an interview after returning from a two-day trip to the Latgale region on Latvia’s border with Russia and Belarus.
Well over two years into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine — and following the passage of 14 rounds of EU sanctions — enforcement remains a major headache for the 27-nation bloc.
Although the measures are agreed at the European level, putting them into practice is a national responsibility, and involves an estimated 160 agencies. EU member countries that border Russia have to deal with huge trade flows from much larger economies like Germany.
Latvia is one of the few EU countries to have consolidated its enforcement efforts in a one-stop sanctions shop, with its financial intelligence unit having taken charge in April. Yet the small Baltic nation lacks the staff and resources to check trade flows from the entire bloc, while a push by Brussels to centralize EU sanctions enforcement went nowhere earlier this year.
Braže, who told POLITICO she had raised concerns at Monday’s meeting of EU foreign ministers, didn’t blame any country individually, and conceded they could be acting in good faith. Nevertheless, she said, some goods crossing the border and ostensibly for civilian use could be ending up at the battlefront.
“Spare parts”
What Braže saw in sparsely populated Latgale was “a conscious process of hiding certain things or presenting banned goods as a different object, like for example cars or trucks declared as spare parts — but de facto they are almost whole cars, just some doors taken out.”
Other goods are either not declared properly, are shipped with the wrong customs code, or are sent to recipients whose bona fides haven’t been checked.
Another headache is dual-use items, which can have a military application in addition to a declared civilian one.
Braže, a former NATO assistant secretary general, cited the example of trucks and tractors that could be militarily useful, as well as tech that could be used in Russian military satellites.
Researchers at the Kyiv School of Economics have found that much of the battlefield technology still reaching Russia is of Western origin.
Some shipments bound for Russia take a roundabout route via Turkey, the UAE or China. Others are trucked into Russia falsely declared as bound for countries like Kazakhstan. And some are simply concealed or mislabeled as they exit the EU.
As they are closer to Germany, the burden of checking cross-border traffic falls mainly on the Baltic nations of Latvia and Lithuania. Estonia now only has one border post open, Braže noted, while Finland has closed all roads into Russia, leaving only a rail link operational.
Braže saw an 18-kilometer line of trucks waiting at the border. “In one lorry there [were] 120 different cargoes so 120 declarations had to be checked. It took two weeks for the customs officer,” she told POLITICO.
Appealing to other EU countries to help ease the burden of upholding sanctions, she said it was “a duty of all EU member states — it’s a national responsibility to implement the sanctions and it’s a duty to make sure that your exporters comply, [and] that your national authorities actually implement those sanctions properly.
“Otherwise,” she said, “the pressure is on our border guards or customs officers to deal with all these consequences.”