BERLIN, February 4. /TASS/. President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen said that the EU had prepared a wide package of economic and financial restrictions against Moscow and did not rule out imposing some sanctions against Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.
"We have prepared a wide package of financial and economic sanctions. It includes [many aspects] from restricting access to foreign capital to controlling the export of technical products. These penalties will further weaken the Russian economy," the president of the European Commission told the Echo and Handelsblatt newspapers on Friday. "Of course, it can largely affect some people from Putin’s entourage and oligarchs, on the one hand, due to personal sanctions, but mainly due to financial and economic restrictions that we are preparing," von der Leyen noted.
Commenting on the question, whether the EU is ready to impose sanctions personally against Putin, if the Ukrainian conflict escalates, von der Leyen noted that "everything depended on Russia." "We will see how the situation develops," she said.
The EU Commission’s president also mentioned that some sanctions could affect the Russian citizens. "The sanctions are very targeted, but, of course, there is always an indirect impact. Hence, the Russian citizens should be strongly interested in their government looking for resolving [this issue] and withdrawing troops [from the Ukrainian border]," the EU Commission’s president said.
Concerns over Moscow’s alleged preparations for an invasion into Ukraine have been increasingly announced in the West and in Kiev recently. Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov castigated these statements as an empty and groundless escalation of tension, emphasizing that Russia posed no threat to anyone. At the same time, the Kremlin spokesman did not exclude some possible provocations to justify such claims and warned that the attempts to resolve the Ukrainian conflict by force would carry extremely serious consequences.