Dutch PM changes EU view of Russia

Final decisions await more deliberations next week — but diplomats said on Friday an initial package was now virtually a done deal. “It is fair to say we are heading in the direction,” one European Union diplomat told Reuters.

Brussels, July 25: When Dutch foreign minister Frans Timmermans spoke to his European Union peers of his grief and anger over the downing of a Malaysia Airlines airliner over eastern Ukraine, it was a turning point in Europe’s approach to Russia.

Several ministers had tears in their eyes when Mr Timmermans said he had known personally some of the 194 Dutch passengers among the 298 people who died on the plane, which Washington believes proRussian separatists shot down in error.

“To my dying day I will not understand that it took so much time for the rescue workers to be allowed to do their difficult job, and that human remains should be used in a political game,” Mr Timmermans told the UN Security Council hours earlier, before flying overnight to Brussels for the crucial EU session. Until that meeting on Tuesday,

Europe had trailed the United States in imposing economic sanctions to pressure Moscow into working to defuse the eight- month crisis in Ukraine in which hundreds of people have been killed.

Many governments were reluctant to antagonise a major energy supplier. Concern over the cost to Europe’s convalescent economy of fraying the vast network of industrial and business links with Russia also weighed heavily. Intense lobbying by Washington, including a warning by President Barack Obama that the plane downing should be “a wakeup call for Europe”, had done little to change that mentality.

But like a supportive family, EU partners rallied around the bereaved Dutch, putting national economic interests aside and for the first time going beyond asset freezes and visa bans on individuals to envisage curbs on entire sectors of the Russian economy that could turn the screw on President Vladimir Putin.

Gruesome images of bodies strewn across fields after the downing of flight MH17 appear to have persuaded some of the opponents of sanctions to take a more decisive, if painful, stand against Russian destabilisation of Ukraine.

Within days of Mr Timmermans’ address, senior EU diplomats had agreed the broad outlines of potential sanctions on Russian access to EU capital markets, defence and energy technology.

Final decisions await more deliberations next week — but diplomats said on Friday an initial package was now virtually a done deal. “It is fair to say we are heading in the direction,” one EU diplomat told Reuters. In the run up to Friday’s discussions, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte had a series of phone calls with his EU counterparts, near daily calls with Mr Obama and six conversations with Mr Putin.

“We want , as a country that has acquired a certain moral obligation as a result of this tragedy, to promote Europe taking a common line on this,” Mr Rutte told Parliament in The Hague.

The Dutch are a trading nation with outsized commercial ties to Russia and are often reluctant to let politics get in the way of a good deal. But an opinion poll this week found 78 per cent back sanctions even if it hurts their own economy.

— Reuters