European Union (EU) foreign ministers will meet this Monday, with the participation of their counterpart from the United Kingdom, to approve more sanctions against Iran, and also with the new head of Ukrainian diplomacy.
On the table will be a discussion on how to prevent Russia from receiving technological components that are being supplied by Iran and China. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Paulo Rangel, participates in the meeting.
Sanctions are already in place against companies that supply weapons to the Russian war effort in Ukraine, in the case of Iran, and technological components, in the case of China, but ministers want to evaluate other options, a senior European official said.
A new package of sanctions should be announced on Monday to limit the shipment of Iranian weapons, namely ballistic missiles, said the same source.
The package would only focus on weapons supplied to Moscow and would not include the weapons Tehran supplies to Hezbollah or the escalation in the Middle East, a senior EU official said.
The United Kingdom’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, David Lammy, who took office in July, will participate in the meeting. The United Kingdom was a member state of the EU until the beginning of 2020. The community bloc has, since then, 27 countries.
Ukraine’s new Foreign Minister, Andrii Sybiha, will update EU leaders on the latest developments in the country, which has been trying for more than two years to defeat an invasion by the Russian Federation.
The political-social situation in Venezuela will also be discussed, at a time when the re-elected president, Nicolás Maduro, continues to cement the regime in its repression of political opponents, journalists and activists.
Venezuela, a country that has a significant community of Portuguese and Portuguese descendants, held presidential elections on July 28, after which the National Electoral Council (CNE) attributed victory to Maduro with just over 51% of the votes, while the opposition claims that its candidate, former diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia obtained almost 70% of the votes.
The Venezuelan opposition and several countries in the international community denounced electoral fraud and demanded that the voting records be presented for independent verification, which the CNE says is unfeasible due to a “cyber attack” of which it was allegedly the target.
The election results have been contested in the streets, with demonstrations repressed by security forces, with the record of around two thousand arrests and more than two dozen fatalities.
