U.S. issues visa sanctions against Ukrainian leaders, EU to follow

The U.S. State Department announced on Feb. 19 that it has imposed visa bans on about 20 high-ranking Ukrainians that it considers responsible for the Feb. 18 violence. It cited the refusal of the Party of Regions in parliament to consider legislation that would have introduced political reforms and created a technical government. “Today we moved to restrict visas, to deny, to ban visa issuance to some 20 senior members of the Ukrainian government and other individuals, who we considered responsible for complicity in or responsible for ordering or otherwise directing human rights abuses related to political repression in Ukraine,” said an unnamed senior State Department official during a teleconference with journalists.

The U.S. government will be watching to see whether the government and political opposition will work towards a political compromise and transition government. “In the event that things go well, these visa sanctions that we’ve put in place are reversible,” the official said. “But in the event that they do not go well, there are other steps that we can take in close coordination with the EU in the coming days.”

The Austrian Finance Ministry has proposed freezing the Austrian bank accounts of Ukrainian oligarchs who are responsible for the violence, said a ministry official, as quoted by the Austrian Press Agency. The Austrian Foreign Ministry is responsible for imposing sanctions, the official said. In its turn, the Ministry stated it supports EU sanctions against Ukrainian officials responsible for the violence, said Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurtz. The EU could impose sanctions as soon as Feb. 20, news reports said.

Former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, who has extensive diplomatic experience in Ukraine, told the Polonews agency that sanctions alone won’t be adequate pressure on the Ukrainian government to stop its aggression. “I am convinced that the EU will introduce sanctions against the oligarchs that support the government and are responsible for violence. However, that won’t sober up the government. We are all caught in a trap,” he said. At the same time, he noted that sanctions “are the single actions. The EU can’t send an army since it doesn’t have one.”

Zenon Zawada: It’s noteworthy that the U.S. State Department spokeswoman referred to “other individuals” besides state officials. We are confident that’s a reference to private billionaires who are widely believed to have financed the Party of Regions, including Rinat Akhmetov and Firtash. We are confident that they played a role in the government’s call for a truce last night (that proved hollow).

EU financial sanctions would be more effective than a U.S. travel ban as Ukraine’s oligarchs have most of their assets parked in the EU. A decision on sanctions by the Austrian government would be valuable as that is the believed destination of the assets of Presidential Administration Head Andriy Klyuyev, former Prime Minister Mykola Azarov and billionaire natural gas trader Dmytro Firtash. Meanwhile, nations such as Great Britain could also have an effect.

Kwasniewski has accurately assessed the unlikelihood of sanctions alone to change the destructive course of the Yanukovych administration. Unfortunately, the West has relied on textbook solutions in addressing a crisis that demands out-of-the-box thinking.