UK’s sanctions geared to spoil Moscow-EU ties after Brexit

London’s energetic efforts to lobby a new package of anti-Russian sanctions through the European Union are geared to undermine relations between Russia and the European Union in the light of imminent Brexit, a spokesman for the Russian embassy in the United Kingdom told TASS on Monday.

"We have taken notice of UK Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s statement of October 14. We have seen media publications. They indicate that, being on the brink of the exit from the European Union, official London keeps on trying to use the slightest possibility to ultimately persuade Western Europeans to build up sanctions pressure on Russia and complicate as much as possible prospects for the normalization of relations between Russia and the European Union after Brexit," he said.

Hunt said on Sunday that another package of sanctions initiated by the United Kingdom and France after attacks in Syria and Britain’s Salisbury would be officially adopted by the EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg on October 15.

Earlier on Monday, foreign ministers from 28 member states of the European Union backed a new regime of introducing sanctions against individuals and legal entities, deemed responsible for using and proliferating chemical weapons.

After the EU summit in late June, a decision was made to introduce new restrictions to fight against the use of chemical weapons. The step was announced a day after an emergency session of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague. The session was convened at the initiative of the UK and the US over the Salisbury poisoning of former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia and also over the alleged use of chemical weapons by Syrian government forces. The OPCW members empowered the organization to punish alleged violators by a majority vote. Russia’s envoy to the OPCW Alexander Shulgin dismissed the decision as usurping the exclusive powers of the UN Security Council.