BRUSSELS, August 11. /TASS/. The European Union will work on a new, 19th package of sanctions against Russia, chief of the European diplomacy Kaja Kallas told reporters after a videoconference of the EU foreign ministers urgently convened ahead of the upcoming Russia-US summit.
In her opinion, the EU should not discuss concessions until Russia agrees to a full and unconditional truce. Kallas believes that the sequence of actions should include first a truce without preconditions with a strict monitoring system and ironclad guarantees, and negotiations later. Until that happened, she promised to work on the 19th package of sanctions.
Earlier, she wrote on X that she intends to end the Ukrainian conflict with the help of transatlantic unity, support for Ukraine and pressure on Russia.
The main topic of the videoconference was preparation for telephone talks between the EU leaders, the head of the European Commission and the Secretary General of NATO with US President Donald Trump, which the German chancellor undertook to organize on August 13.
On July 18, the EU adopted the 18th package of sanctions aimed at the oil and banking sectors of the Russian economy. It includes banning the EU countries from purchasing petroleum products made from Russian oil, if they are not produced in the United States, Great Britain and Canada, and imposed restrictions on the Nord Stream and Nord Stream-2 gas pipelines, three of the four strands of which were destroyed by sabotage. The EU also lowered the ceiling on the Russian oil prices to $47.6 per barrel, and included in its blacklist 105 tankers that transport Russian oil under market contracts, ignoring attempts to set a price ceiling.