Morning Brussels. Angela Skujins here ringing out the hopefully penultimate day of this heatwave in the Belgian capital, and the final day of the working week.
Here’s what’s driving your Friday: Discussion on the 21st package of sanctions fires up, Commissioner McGrath’s trip to Malta prompts questions, and an environment council’s first infantile guest.
Negotiating the blacklist. EU ambassadors are set to discuss today a revised compromise for the 21st package of sanctions against Russia, my colleague Jorge Liboreiro writes in to report.
The proposal, unveiled earlier this month, still contains some points that need to be ironed out before 15 July, when the automatic revision of the price cap (currently set at $44 per barrel) is due to kick in.
Ambassadors are considering whether to postpone the review until next year as the Commission has suggested, or establish a brand-new fixed cap. The price of Russia’s Urals crude soared in the aftermath of the Middle East conflict, but has since gone down and is now trading at about $58 per barrel. That’s something ambassadors will have to keep in mind.
Another issue under intense discussion, Jorge hears, is the first-ever ban on fish imports that the Commission has tabled.
It turns out that several member states buy a considerable amount of cod and pollock from Russia every year and are nervous about disruption in the supply chains. The ban on sales of LNG tankers is also proving tricky due to the economic losses it would entail.
Meanwhile, Bulgaria, under its new government, has emerged as a disruptive force. Prime Minister Rumen Radev has made clear his opposition to sanctioning Patriarch Kirill, the head of Russia’s Orthodox Church, citing religious, historical and cultural reasons. The EU first tried to blacklist Kiril in 2022, but Hungary, under Viktor Orbán, blocked the move.
Another name that Radev opposes is Vagit Alekperov, the billionaire founder of Lukoil, Russia’s major oil company. Alekperov stepped down as president in 2022 but retained shares in the company.
“We will not allow the sanctions package to pass in this form. We have a vote, and we will use it,” Radev said last week after attending the EU summit in Brussels.
Malfeasance in Malta. Corinne Vella, the sister of assassinated journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, said it is “good timing” for the European Commissioner of Justice Michael McGrath to visit Malta on Thursday. According to the Commissioner’s calendar, McGrath met reinstated Maltese prime minister Robert Abela of the Labour Party along with civil society representatives.
Vella told me she believes the meeting with Abela – serving out another term due to his party’s landslide victory at the May election – would be about the “art of diplomacy”. It is in the interest of the European Commission to persuade governments of mutual interest to implement rule of law recommendations as there is no real teeth to these reports.
The annual scorecards charting each EU member state’s level of corruption and reforms was blistering for Malta, with “limited” or “some” progress made on things like improving the efficacy of the justice system and speeding up investigations of high-level corruption cases. There was “no progress” made on making it safer for journalists to do their jobs.
The latest reporting by Transparency International shows that almost 30% of individuals asked believe corruption has increased in the last year.
Vella is speaking on behalf of the Daphne Foundation, an organisation advocating for press freedom particularly around political journalism in Malta. The next rule of law report is expected to come out next month, but she doesn’t sound like she has high hopes.
“We keep noting the same issues year on year,” said Vella, who has provided input to the EU executive on these documents since 2018. “In terms of anti-corruption, we've got reports from various institutions, multilateral bodies, and the rule of law reports from the Commission, the public inquiry recommendations,” she added.
“There's reams of material. Our government doesn't need to wait to be told what to do, they've already been told what to do.”
In other news— baby’s first council meeting. For the first time in EU council history, a baby was brought into a EU council meeting.
Swedish climate minister Romina Pourmokhtari set a new standard by bringing her three-month old son, Adam, to an environment meeting in Luxembourg on Thursday. Pourmokhtari is known as being a record-breaker, and was sworn in as Sweden’s youngest government minister at the age of 27.
On her way into the talks, she mentioned that Europe is a “wonderful place to live” as she can attend meetings and the needs of her child simultaneously. In Sweden, parents have roughly 480 days they can take off together to care for their newborns, with dads also expected to participate.
Europe's Taliban dilemma: The struggle to return Afghan migrants
The EU’s efforts to return irregular migrants to Afghanistan face a fundamental dilemma: how to solve the long-standing and intractable issue of the repatriation of Afghans while avoiding legitimising the Taliban, a regime the bloc has refused to formally recognise since it seized power in 2021.
UN and migration experts have warned that it will become increasingly difficult for the EU to maintain its boycott of a government that's long sought diplomatic legitimacy in Europe while also managing the politically sensitive issue of Afghan returns.
That tension was reflected on Tuesday, when officials from the European Commission and 15 member states quietly met with a Taliban delegation in Brussels in an attempt to speed up the return of irregular Afghan migrants, prioritising those “who have committed serious crimes or pose a security threat."
The controversial meeting – held five months after a first round of talks in Kabul – marked the first time Taliban representatives had been invited to Brussels. It was immediately met with severe criticism.
“Given the very dire human rights situation in Afghanistan, we are against forced returns,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk told Euronews on Thursday. “If they have committed crimes, they need to be put to justice in Europe. [...] But you cannot return people to a situation where they may be tortured,” he said.
According to the latest data, 14,270 Afghan nationals were ordered to leave the bloc in the first nine months of last year, but only 340 were actually returned, a rate of about 2 percent – well below the EU average return rate of roughly 29 percent.
Read more of this reporting by my colleague Vincenzo Genovese.
More from our newsrooms
Macron says France intercepted a Russian shadow fleet oil tanker off coast of Sicily
French forces intercepted a Russian shadow fleet oil tanker earlier this week, French President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday. "We will not allow the ‘shadow fleet’ to circumvent sanctions and finance Russia’s war effort," he said. More on this by my colleague Nathan Rennolds.
NATO chief Rutte defends allies as Trump says he was 'let down' on Iran
Rutte pushed back gently against Trump's latest NATO complaints, saying, “I know there have been isolated cases about which you are really disappointed, but generally speaking, your European allies have been there with you." Emma De Ruiter breaks it down.
Brussels tightens rules on US cloud providers as it pushes for tech sovereignty
The European Commission has decided that Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services should face strict rules to improve cloud competition. The move risks angering Washington as Brussels pushes the European tech sovereignty agenda. Luca Bertuzzi has the details.
We're also keeping an eye on
- Energy ministers meet in Luxembourg for a Transport, Telecommunications and Energy Council meeting.
- European Commissioner for Enlargement Marta Kos meets Jeremy Lewin, Undersecretary of State of the United States in Gdańsk, Poland.
- European Commissioner for the Economy Valdis Dombrovskis meets with Director of the Economic Security Bureau of Ukraine, Oleksandr Tsyvinskyi, in Gdańsk, Poland.
That’s it for today. Jorge Liboreirocontributed to this newsletter.
