EU proposing to sanction Chinese technology firms for supporting Russia in its war on Ukraine - draft documents

Jennifer Rankin

The European Union is proposing to sanction several Chinese technology firms for aiding Russia’s war against Ukraine, according to draft documents seen by the Guardian.

The EU is targeting seven companies from China and Hong Kong, as well as firms based in Russia, Serbia, Iran, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates, for “supporting Russia’s military industrial complex”.

Many of the companies are believed to be supplying dual-used goods, i.e. goods with a civilian and military purpose, such as electronics and aviation parts, which have been used by Russia to attack Ukraine.

The measures, which are still to be agreed by EU member states, would make up the EU’s 15th round of sanctions against Russia since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was launched in 2022.

The EU also wants to ban dozens of vessels from docking at European ports, in a bid to clamp down on Russia’s shadow fleet, which is transporting oil around the world above the $60 price cap imposed by the G7 richer countries, providing a vital source of revenue for Moscow.

It has also proposed adding 54 people to its sanctions list, including military personnel responsible for the devastating missile attack on the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in Kyiv in July that killed at least 44 people and injured many more.

Being on the EU’s sanctions list means any assets in the bloc are frozen, while individuals are also subject to a travel ban.

The UK government recently supplied Ukraine with dozens more Storm Shadow cruise missiles, sources have told Bloomberg. The missiles have a range of about 250km (155 miles), similar to the US army tactical missile systems (Atacms), and have in the past been given to Kyiv by the UK and France to strike targets inside Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders.

Bloomberg reports:

The deliveries, which were not publicly announced, took place several weeks ago and were ordered after Kyiv ran low on the long-range missiles, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing security issues.

They were sent before the recent decision by the US and the UK to allow Ukraine to fire long-range missiles at targets inside Russia. The people declined to say exactly when they arrived or give a precise number, citing the need for operational security…

Ukrainian forces fired the British Storm Shadow missiles at targets inside Russia for the first time last week, a day after launching US-made Atacms,a military facility in the western Bryansk region.

The decisions by London and Washington to allow the strikes, which Kyiv had long requested, came in response to the Kremlin deploying North Korean troops to fight against Ukraine, according to officials from both governments.

In response to the reports, a Ministry of Defence spokesperson said: “We do not comment on operational detail, to do so would only benefit Putin. The UK’s support for Ukraine is ironclad, that’s why we have committed to providing £3 billion in military aid for as long as it takes and have trained more than 50,000 Ukrainian military recruits.”

Moscow has said the use of western weapons to strike Russian territory far from the border would be a major escalation in the war.

Lt Gen Alexander Sanchik has been appointed acting commander of Russia’s so-called “south” group of forces, the RBC news outlet cited anonymous sources as saying on Tuesday.

The move follows the dismissal of the previous commander of the group, one of the large army units involved in Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Here is an extract from the report:

Since 2020, Sanchik has held the post of commander of the 35th combined arms army of the eastern military district. In 2023 he held the post of first deputy commander of the troops of the eastern military district. On 15 May 2024, he attended a meeting with the president as acting commander of the troops of the eastern military district.

As RBC reported earlier, the former commander of the “south” group of forces, Col Gen Gennady Anashkin, was removed from his post. A source of RBC in the ministry of defence reported that the decision was made as part of a planned rotation.

Russian forces have captured the village of Kopanky in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region, the Interfax news agency cited Russia’s defence ministry as saying on Tuesday. Kopanky is close to the administrative border with the Luhansk region. We are yet to independently verify the reports of the capture. The Russian defence ministry also said Russian forces had downed three Ukrainian drones near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine.

Russia has confirmed it has detained a British man it captured fighting for Ukraine in Kyiv’s offensive into Russia’s western Kursk region.

A court in the region said it had on Monday ordered James Scott Rhys Anderson be remanded in custody, alleging he had “participated in armed hostilities on the territory of the Kursk region”.

Tass, the Russian news agency, has quoted Anderson as saying that he had served as a signalman in the British army for four years and then joined the International Legion of Ukraine, formed early on in Russia’s full-scale invasion launched in February 2022.

In Ukraine, Anderson reportedly served as an instructor for Ukrainian troops and was deployed to the Kursk region against his will. Tass published a video of the man saying in English that he doesn’t want to be “here”.

As we mentioned in the opening post, Russia has slowly expanded the amount of territory they control, making incremental gains, mostly in the east of Ukraine.

The thrust of the gradual Russian advance has been in the Donetsk region, with Russian forces pushing towards the town of Pokrovsk, an important transport hub, and into the town of Kurakhove, a city 35km (21 miles) south of Pokrovsk. Russia has increasingly encircled territory and then hit Ukrainian forces with artillery and glide bombs, according to Russian analysts.

The general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces said in its Monday update that 45 battles of varying intensity were raging along the Kurakhove part of the front line that evening.
If Russia can pierce the Ukrainian defences around Kurakhove, then they will be able to push westwards towards the city of Zaporizhzhia and then towards Pokrovsk, Russian war bloggers said.

Welcome to our coverage of Russia’s war on Ukraine with the news that Russia has fired 188 drones into Ukraine, the highest number in a single night.

Ukraine’s military said on Tuesday it shot down 76 of the weapons, adding it lost track of 96 of the drones, likely due to active electronic warfare, and five drones headed towards Belarus.

Kyiv came under sustained Russian drone attack, mayor Vitali Klitschko said early on Tuesday. “The UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) attack on the capital continues,” Klitschko wrote on Telegram.

“Air defence forces are operating in different areas of the city. (Drones) are entering the capital from different directions.”

Witnesses told Reuters they heard a series of explosions in what sounded like air defence systems in operation.

The Ukrainian capital, its surrounding region and the vast majority of the Ukrainian territory was under air raid alerts. In Kyiv, the air raid alarms started at around 1900 GMT.

Meanwhile, a Russian overnight strike on critical infrastructure cut power to 70% of Ukraine’s western Ternopil region, its governor said on national television. Vyacheslav Nehoda said damage was “substantial” and it would impact the power supply in Ternopil and the surrounding region “for a long time”. In other news:

• The British foreign secretary has said the UK is not sending troops into Ukraine, after Le Monde reported on Monday that France and the UK are “not ruling out” such a move. When he was asked about the report in an interview, David Lammy said the UK’s position had not changed. “We are very clear that we stand ready and continue to support the Ukrainians with training particularly, but there has been a longstanding position that we are not committing UK troops to the theatre of action,” he told newspapers La Repubblica, Le Monde and Die Welt at the G7 foreign ministers’ meeting in Italy.

• Russian forces are advancing in Ukraine at the fastest rate since the early days of the 2022 invasion, taking an area half the size of Greater London over the past month, analysts and war bloggers say. The war is entering what some Russian and western officials say could be its most dangerous phase after Moscow’s forces made some of their biggest territorial gains. “Russia has set new weekly and monthly records for the size of the occupied territory in Ukraine,” independent Russian news group Agentstvo said in a report. The Russian army captured almost 235 sq km (91 sq miles) in Ukraine over the past week, a weekly record for 2024, it said.

• Ambassadors from Ukraine and Nato’s 32 members will meet on Tuesday in Brussels over Russia’s firing last week of an experimental intermediate-range ballistic missile. Russia on Thursday carried out a strike on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro which President Vladimir Putin said was a test of its new Oreshnik missile. But, according to the Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency, expectations are low for any major results from the consultations on Tuesday afternoon at the alliance’s Brussels headquarters. The most that is expected is a reiteration of Nato’s earlier insistence that Moscow’s deployment of the new weaponry will not “deter Nato allies from supporting Ukraine”.

• A new Nato mission located in Wiesbaden will take over the coordination of western military aid for Ukraine in January, Germany’s defence minister, Boris Pistorius, said on Monday. The setting up of NSATU – Nato Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine – has been months in the planning and is widely seen as an effort to safeguard the aid mechanism against interference by Donald Trump. Europeans will step up military support for Ukraine, Pistorius pledged, after talks in Berlin with his British, French, Italian and Polish counterparts. “Our target must be to enable Ukraine to act out of a position of strength,” Pistorius said after hosting a meeting of the five leading nations in European defence.