EU sanctions have limited impact on Russia – Lithuanian president

VILNIUS – The existing EU sanctions have had a limited impact on Russia's economy, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda says, adding that measures to prevent their circumvention need to be tightened.

According to the president, the limited impact is reflected in Russia's macroeconomic indicators.

"We have to admit that those 13 sanction packages – the 13th one has not been implemented yet – have had a very limited impact on Russia's economy as we can see from the country's macro-economic indicators," Nauseda told journalists in Munich on Saturday.

H also stressed the need to tighten controls on ways of circumventing the sanctions as they make the restrictions ineffective.

"We need to deal with the secondary consequences and the ways of circumventing these sanctions, which are so widespread that they practically render the sanctions mechanism itself ineffective and empty," Nauseda said.

He also believes that decisions on how to use the frozen Russian funds for the reconstruction of Ukraine should be made sooner.

"We need faster decision on what to do with those frozen Russian assets that we now have and we do not know what to do with them because we cannot find legal means to use those real assets for the reconstruction of Ukraine," Nauseda said.

Some 1,500 Russian and Belarusian citizens and 207 entities are now subject to the existing EU sanctions that have led to the freezing of 215 billion euro worth of assets in EU member states, as well as the immobilization of around 300 billion euro worth of assets of the Central Bank of Russia in the EU and the G7 countries.