Under Trump pressure, EU proposes going after Chinese firms buying Russia oil
The bloc unveiled measures that would seek to squeeze Russia, but wouldn’t fully meet demands by President Trump.
The European Union proposed sanctions against Chinese and other foreign companies buying Russian oil, as part of a package of measures intended to show President Trump the bloc is ramping up economic pressure on Russia and its backers.
The EU also would impose new banking sanctions, black list additional companies aiding Russia’s military and speed up its plan to phase out purchases of Russian liquefied natural gas. The measures will need the backing of all 27 member states, which isn’t guaranteed.
The proposal goes only some way toward the tougher action demanded by Trump as a condition for imposing new U.S. sanctions against the Kremlin. He has told European officials he wants tariffs as high as 100% on China for its support of Russia, but the EU has long resisted using tariffs as leverage in the way Trump has.
“Trump’s pressure on Europe to move faster on banning Russian energy imports seems to have worked," said Simone Tagliapietra, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a think tank.
If approved, the new sanctions package would move the EU further toward applying the kind of extraterritorial sanctions the U.S. has long used—and Europe has complained about. EU sanctions generally only apply to people and firms in the EU and the country being targeted.
The EU has in place a Russian oil-price cap of $47.60 per barrel. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Friday that the EU would go after oil traders, petrochemical companies and refineries in third countries, including China, that buy oil in breach of the price cap.
The EU would black list another 118 vessels that are suspected of shipping Russian oil and ban transactions by Russian oil giants Rosneft and Gazpromneft. It also would sanction additional Russian banks and foreign banks that help finance Russian firms.
The EU would ban purchases of LNG at the end of 2026, a year earlier than planned. Last year, the EU bought close to $27 billion in Russian energy exports, but that is down from about $169 billion in 2022, according to the EU.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said this week that any new EU sanctions would be seen as hostile acts and wouldn’t prompt Moscow to change its position on the Ukraine war.
New limits to Russia’s ability to export its oil and gas, which typically account for up to a third of state budget revenues, would strain Moscow’s already slowing economy.
The Russian economy posted surprisingly resilient growth in the past two years, around 4% in 2023 and 2024, on the back of oil exports and military expenditures. Growth this year, however, is expected to slow to around 1% under the weight of high inflation and interest rates.
The speedier phaseout of Russian LNG would amount to a significant reshuffle in the EU’s gas supply.
The EU has increased its purchases of Russian LNG since Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, hitting a record last year as European buyers took advantage of cheaper Russian imports. Russian LNG accounted for 20% of the EU’s total LNG imports, according to the European Commission.
Russia’s share of EU imports has fallen to 14% this year, but it is still the second biggest source after the U.S. The share of U.S. LNG, meanwhile, has risen to 57% this year, up from 28% in 2021.
Deliveries of Russian pipeline gas, by contrast, have collapsed. Russia’s share of overall EU gas imports fell to 10% this year, from more than 40% before the war.
Write to Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com and Georgi Kantchev at georgi.kantchev@wsj.com
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