The EU will hit more Russian officials with travel bans and asset freezes by the end of the week.<br /><br />European foreign ministers made the decision at a meeting in Brussels.<br /><br />EU ambassadors will draw up the list of those to be sanctioned on Thursday.<br /><br />German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said: “We will substantially increase the pressure on those who do not cooperate to overcome the current crisis – and many around the table expressed the opinion that in particular Russia has not done enough to seriously defuse the conflict in eastern Ukraine.”<br /><br />Ministers also asked the European Commission to prepare possible sanctions in key economic areas by Thursday.<br /><br />They include access to capital markets, defence, and sensitive technologies including energy.<br /><br />Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans said: “The Council has decided today to make the possibility of further sanctions concrete – that will happen by the compilation of a list of names, which will take us only a couple of days. and, further on, we will start very explicitly to work on the so called ‘third phase sanctions’.<br /><br />But as Euronews correspondent James Franey reports, it is only EU leaders who can decide on whether to fully implement those economic sanctions.
