EU Increasing Monitoring of Russia Export Control Evasion, Official Says
The EU is ramping up efforts to monitor Russia-related export control evasion and hopes to soon make more progress on sanctions enforcement within the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council, said Sabine Weyand, the European Commission’s director general for trade, speaking during a July 13 event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She expects EU enforcement to soon pick up because many of the bloc’s wind-down periods for the restrictions are ending.
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“That is why now is the moment to be attentive and to look at circumvention and evasion,” Weyand said. “The work on Russia is not done.”
Weyand said the EU has so far seen some attempts at evasion, “but it's not widespread yet.” Like U.S. businesses, she said European companies have mostly been complying with the controls. “The sanctions have a chilling effect on trade, well beyond the actual scope of the sanctions themselves, which is not surprising,” she said. “Companies are withdrawing from Russia for reasons of avoiding reputational damage.”
She also said the EU hasn’t had to adjudicate many license applications for Russia, partly because it has received very few. Because of this, she said, the next few months will be a pivotal test of the effectiveness of its controls.
“Now we are turning our attention to monitoring the implementation and the enforcement of these measures because, in a way, agreeing on the export controls [was] the easy part,” Weyand said. “But you then actually have to make that stick and make sure it works as intended. And you really need to go deep into exchanging information, sometimes also classified information, in order to know what you're doing.”
The EU is “very much relying on the superior U.S. machinery to get insights” into evasion attempts, she said. The U.S. last month added several Chinese companies to the Entity List for helping to backfill Russia with items subject to export controls (see 2206280056).
Much of the cooperation is happening at the TTC, which Weyand said is just starting to focus more on enforcement monitoring. But she also tempered expectations for the group, saying it’s still a relatively new body. “The TTC is still in its infancy. It's not even a toddler,” Weyand said. “It's been in place for a year and it has had two successful meetings.”
The TTC is also being used as a forum to discuss China, Weyand said, which she said should be approached very differently from Russia. While the Western nations are hoping to degrade Russia’s ability to produce technology and manufacture items for its military, Beijing calls for a separate strategy, Weyand said.
With China, the EU is “much more looking at: Where is there a misuse of technology, and where do we have to be careful in exporting technology that we are not feeding oppression, we are not feeding distortions in our markets?” Weyand said. “So it's not exactly the same approach [as Russia], and it will require a lot of work and discussions, and that is what we are doing now in the TTC.”