The European Union has approved a new package of sanctions against Russia, its 13th since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine almost two years ago, in what the bloc's rotating president Belgium said was "one of the broadest approved by the EU."
The new package, agreed on February 21, will add nearly 200 more entities and individuals to the list and will include restrictions aimed at blocking the purchase of "drone components that end up in the Russian military complex and then on the battlefield in Ukraine," EU diplomats were quoted as saying, adding that the list includes several Russian companies, as well as third countries.
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The Belgian presidency said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that the package will be formally approved for February 24, the second anniversary of the start of Russia's invasion.
RFE/RL journalists who saw the sanctions lists as it was being prepared for publication said sectoral sanctions apply to 27 companies, among them some from China, India, Turkey, Serbia, and Kazakhstan.
The EU ambassadors also reportedly rejected an attempt by Hungary to strike down the names of three Russian oligarchs -- Alisher Usmanov, Vyacheslav Kantor, and Dmitry Mazepin, Jr. -- from the lists.
The list includes the names of 48 heads of military companies as well as more than 50 companies that produce heavy and light weaponry and their components as well as IT and logistics firms that cooperate with the Russian Defense Ministry and the firms' chiefs.
It also includes 12 individuals who hold self-styled positions of judges and ministers in the Russian-imposed institutions in occupied territories in Ukraine.
Among them is Valentina Lavryk, the so-called minister of education, science, and youth in occupied Crimea, who "controls the implementation of the militarization of education for Ukrainian children in...Crimea, as well as the suppression of the Ukrainian language and culture for these children," according to the document that justifies the sanctions.
Lavryk, the document adds, was "responsible for the coordination and supervision of the transfer of children from the illegally occupied regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhya to camps located in Crimea," the document says.
The list also includes the so-called acting ministers of health, labor, education, youth policies, and industry of the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine's Kherson region.