Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has announced new rounds of sanctions aimed at Russia’s military-industrial complex, its financial networks and the intermediaries that serve them.
In an evening video address on August 14 he said Ukraine had adopted measures against companies and ships moving grain and other goods taken from occupied Ukrainian territory, according to Interfax-Ukraine. Further packages targeting weapons producers and their financiers were being prepared, he said.
Zelensky said the work would have to be completed during August and September. Ukrainian diplomats had been given a direct task in the world’s major jurisdictions, he added, with restrictions to fall on Russian firms and individuals whose role genuinely mattered in prolonging the war.
The president had earlier ordered officials to draw up a plan for what he called a special sanctions operation against the Russian defence industry. He told a coordination meeting on August 6 that the aim was to deny Moscow the time to adapt to restrictions.
Russian missiles, drones and most other weapons contained critical components made in other countries, Zelensky said, and without foreign machine tools Moscow would be a generation behind. Ukraine needed to “limit the aggressor state’s ties with the rest of the world”, he said.
Kyiv has already acted on that argument. A decree signed on August 3 imposed sanctions on 23 companies and 20 individuals tied to the production of ballistic missiles, air defence systems and electronic warfare equipment, among them the Belarusian firm Kidma Tech and the Morozov Plant, part of the Rostec group.
The same decree instructed the Ukrainian foreign ministry to notify the EU, the United States and other governments of the designations and to seek matching listings abroad. Ukraine is in effect asking its partners to adopt a list it has drawn up itself.
The Council of the European Union adopted its 21st package on July 23, adding 48 individuals and 168 entities to the asset-freeze list and extending transaction bans to 33 further Russian banks and to crypto-asset service providers. Bloomberg reported in late July that a 22nd package covering about 1,600 more companies was being prepared for October, a claim the European Commission has not confirmed.
Recent rounds have shown the limits of the approach. An attempt to list Chinese firms drew warnings from Beijing over access to rare earths, while Moscow answered the 20th package by widening its entry ban on European officials.
