Author: European Council.

The Council prolonged by 6 months the application of EU restrictive measures targeting actions against Ukraine’s territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence. These sanctions consist of an asset freeze and a travel ban against 146 persons and 37 entities. They have been extended until 15 March 2017.

The measures had been introduced in March 2014 and were last extended in March 2016.The assessment of the situation did not justify a change in the regime of sanctions nor in the list of persons and entities under restrictive measures. Information and statement of reasons for listing related to these persons and entities were updated as necessary.

The legal acts are available in the EU Official Journal of 16 September 2016. The decision was adopted by written procedure.

Several EU measures are in place in response to the crisis in Ukraine including:

– economic sanctions targeting specific sectors of the Russian economy, currently in place until 31 January 2017;

– restrictive measures in response to the illegal annexation of Crimea and Sevastopol, limited to the territory of Crimea and Sevastopol, currently in place until 23 June 2017.</s>The former leader of Catalonia, who led the Spanish region to a declaration of independence last year and subsequently fled to Belgium, has said he will not seek to regain his former post "for the time being." Madrid (dpa) - Renouncing a</s>BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union is extending for six months the sanctions targeting people and entities involved in what the EU considers Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.

The extension, officially announced Thursday, consists of an asset freeze and a ban on EU travel, and affects 146 individuals and 37 entities.

The measures, originally introduced in 2014, were last extended in March, the EU said in a statement. The latest action endorsed by representatives from the 28 EU member states means the punitive measures can remain in force through March 15, 2017.

European Union leaders have strongly condemned Russia's annexation of Crimea. The people and entities subject to EU sanctions are deemed to have acted "against Ukraine's territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence."</s>MOSCOW (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin has inspected construction work on a mammoth bridge intended to link the Crimean Peninsula to mainland Russia.

Putin, who was in the Crimean city of Kerch Thursday, visited the construction site for the 19-kilometer (12-miles) bridge across the Kerch Strait set to open in December 2018

After annexing Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014, Russia has moved to improve the Black Sea peninsula's transport and energy infrastructure. Those efforts have grown more urgent as the Ukrainian government last year barred all commercial transport from crossing into Crimea via a strip of Ukrainian land.

Russia has also laid undersea power cables to Crimea to end its reliance on Ukraine. Crimea last year experienced severe shortages after anti-Russia protesters in Ukraine blocked power supplies.

From left, Crimean leader Sergei Aksyonov, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev listen to Crimean Museum director Tatyana Umrikhina in Kerch, Crimea on Thursday, Sept. 15, 2016. Russian President Vladimir Putin is due to hold a Presidential Security Council meeting and attend an event at the Kerch Bridge site. (Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

From right, Crimean leader Sergei Aksyonov, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Crimean Museum director Tatyana Umrikhina and Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev walk in Kerch, Crimea on Thursday, Sept. 15, 2016. Russian President Vladimir Putin is due to hold a Presidential Security Council meeting and attend an event at the Kerch Bridge site. (Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)</s>While his nation waded deeper into the Syrian civil war, Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, spent his 63rd birthday on the ice Wednesday, October 7, playing hockey with NHL stars and various Russian officials and tycoons in Sochi. For years, Russia's leader has cultivated a populist image in the Russian media.

Putin holds a cat as he inspects housing built for victims of wildfires in the village of Krasnopolye, in a region in southeastern Siberia, Russia, on Friday, September 4.

Putin, left, and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev jokingly toast at a lunch during a meeting at the Black Sea resort in Sochi, Russia, on Sunday, August 30.

Putin exercises during his meeting with Medvedev on August 30.

Putin sits in a bathyscaphe as it plunges into the Black Sea along the coast of Sevastopol, Crimea, on Tuesday, August 18. Putin went underwater to see the wreckage of an ancient merchant ship that was found in the end of May.

Putin holds a Persian leopard cub in February 2014 at a breeding and rehabilitation center in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. Perhaps the most important vote in Russia's public selection of a new Olympic mascot was cast when Putin said he wanted a funky leopard to represent the 2014 Sochi Winter Games.

Putin holds a pike he caught in the Siberian Tuva region of Russia on July 20, 2013.

Putin enjoys some fishing during his vacation to the Tuva region on July 20, 2013.

Putin submerges on board Sea Explorer 5 bathyscaphe near the isle of Gogland in the Gulf of Finland on July 15, 2013.

Putin studies a crane during an experiment called Flight of Hope on September 5, 2012, in which he piloted a hang glider, aiming to lead the birds into flight. It's part of a project to save the rare species of crane.

Putin takes part in a training session for young ice hockey players before the "Golden Puck" youth tournament final in Moscow on April 15, 2011.

Putin rides a Harley-Davidson to an international biker convention in southern Ukraine on July 14, 2010.

The Russian president aims at a whale with an arbalest (crossbow) to take a piece of its skin for analysis at Olga Bay on August 25, 2010.

A wetsuit-clad Putin embarks on a dive to an underwater archaeological site at Phanagoria on the Taman Peninsula on August 10, 2011.

Famed for his love of martial arts, Putin throws a competitor in a judo session at an athletics school in St. Petersburg on December 18, 2009.

Putin during his vacation in southern Siberia on August 3, 2009.

Putin swims the butterfly during his vacation outside the town of Kyzyl in southern Siberia on August 3, 2009.

Assisted by a Russian scientist, Putin fixes a satellite transmitter to a tiger during his visit to the Ussuriysky forest reserve of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the Far East on August 31, 2008.</s>Slovakia's Fico says Ukraine doing less than Russia to meet Minsk deal

BRATISLAVA, Sept 17 (Reuters) - Ukraine is doing less than Russia to meet its obligations under the Minsk peace plan, Slovakia's Prime Minister Robert Fico said on Saturday, stepping up calls for the European Union to end sanctions against Moscow.

Fico said sanctions have been ineffective while harming European Union and member Slovakia's economic interests. But added he would respect EU solidarity on the issue.

"When speaking about the implementation of the Minsk agreement, it needs to be said clearly that both parties are violating it. Actually, if we were to do an inventory of how Ukraine is meeting it, you would have to say Ukraine is meeting it even less than Russia," Fico told Reuters in an interview.

"With the Minsk agreement (to bring peace in Ukraine), it is necessary to take stock. It is not true that Ukraine is the good guy and Russia is the bad guy," he said.

The EU imposed energy, financial and defence sanctions on Moscow after it annexed Ukraine's Crimea in 2014 and agreed in June to extend them until the end of January.

Fico has repeatedly called for the end of the sanctions, most recently after meeting President Vladimir Putin in Moscow in August.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in a phone call on Saturday to do his part in implementing the peace plan.

"The Chancellor expressed the opinion that the coming weeks must be used to take a decisive step forward," a German government spokeswoman said, adding Merkel told Poroshenko it was essential that both Russia and Ukraine demonstrated the political will to reach an agreement.

Merkel said last month there was no reason to lift sanctions as Russia has not fulfilled its commitments under the Minsk agreements aimed at ending the conflict in eastern Ukraine where Kiev and the West say Russia is arming and supporting separatist rebels.

Germany's Social Democrats, junior partner in Merkel's ruling coalition, have adopted a more conciliatory stance towards Moscow than her conservative bloc.

Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a senior SPD member, has said the EU should gradually phase out sanctions imposed against Russia over the Ukraine crisis if there is substantial progress in the peace process.

But Merkel insists the sanctions can only be lifted once the peace agreement is fully implemented, not partially.

Fico said on Saturday the sanctions had done nothing to change Russian policy. "Sanctions are harming the EU and Russia and they help the United States. I reject them but at the same time I won't break the unity of the EU on that," he said.

Slovakia holds the rotating EU presidency until the end of this year.

The central European country imports almost all its gas and oil from Russia, as well as nuclear fuel to generate two power plants. It exports cars to Russia, though these are just a fraction of its exports to the EU.

Some neighbouring countries have also questioned the use of sanctions on Russia. Hungary has taken a similar line as Slovakia. Czech President Milos Zeman has also repeatedly called for ending sanctions. (Additional reporting by Michael Nienaber in Berlin; Editing by Jeremy Gaunt and Dominic Evans)</s>“In the walls of the cubicle there were three

tens of thousands throughout the building. … For

some reason they were nicknamed memory holes.”

WASHINGTON — Documents inconvenient to the regime went into the Ministry of Truth’s slits and down to “enormous furnaces.” Modern tyrannies depend on state control of national memories — retroactive truths established by government fiat. Which is why Russia’s Supreme Court recently upheld the conviction of a blogger for violating Article 354.1 of Russia’s criminal code.

This May 2014 provision criminalizes the “Rehabilitation of Nazism.” The blogger’s crime was to write: “The communists and Germany jointly invaded Poland, sparking off the Second World War.” The secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact have gone down one of Vladimir Putin’s memory holes.

The pact was signed Aug. 23, 1939. On Sept. 1, Germany invaded Poland. Sixteen days later, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. Poland was carved up in accordance with the secret protocols, and about six months later Soviet occupiers were conducting the Katyn Forest Massacre of 25,700 Polish military officers, officials, priests and intellectuals.

Although in 2009 Putin denounced the pact as “collusion to solve one’s problems at others’ expense,” in 2015 he defended it as Stalin’s means of buying time to prepare for the Nazi onslaught. This fable is refuted by, among other facts, this: Stalin did not prepare. When Germany’s ambassador in Moscow informed Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov that their nations were now at war, a stunned Molotov asked, “What have we done to deserve this?”

The Russian Supreme Court’s Orwellian ruling was that the blogger denied facts established by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. It convicted leading Nazis of waging aggressive war against, among others, Poland, but, in an act of victors’ justice, made no judgment against the Soviet regime, representatives of which sat on the tribunal. This accommodation to postwar political reality was necessary to enable the tribunal to function, which was necessary for civilizing vengeance. The tribunal ignored, but did not deny, the patent fact of Soviet aggression.

The Russian court’s ruling is a window into the sinister continuity of Putin’s Russia and the Soviet system that incubated him. So, if the former secretary of state who aspires to the American presidency has time to read a book before Jan. 20, she should make it “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin” by Steven Lee Myers of The New York Times. It is a study of the volatile nostalgia of a man seething with resentments acquired as a KGB operative — a “devoted officer of a dying empire” — during the Soviet Union’s final years. It is a pointillist portrait painted with telling details that should cause sobriety to supplant dreams of happy policy “resets” with Russia:

As a senior security official in post-Soviet Russia, Putin kept on his desk a bronze statue of “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police and terror apparatus. During Putin’s May 7, 2000, presidential inauguration, a choir sang a composition “written in 1836 to celebrate a soldier’s death in the war against Poland and rewritten in Soviet times … to remove the homage to the tsar. For Putin, the choir sang the Soviet verses.” There was the 2006 assassination in Moscow, on Putin’s 54th birthday, of the troublesome journalist Anna Politkovskaya. (Asked about the frequent deaths of anti-Putin journalists, Donald Trump breezily said, “I think our country does plenty of killing.”) And the 2006 poisoning in London of Putin’s antagonist Alexander Litvinenko using radioactive polonium-210.

Domestically, Putin’s “managed democracy” is Stalinism leavened by kleptomania, as in the looting of the energy giant Yukos. In foreign policy, Putin’s Russia is unambiguously and unapologetically revanchist. The Soviet Union was likened to a burglar creeping down a hotel corridor until he finds an unlocked door. Putin, who found Crimea unlocked (when he honeymooned there in 1983, it seemed “a magical, sacred place to him,” writes Myers), is pushing on the door of what remains of Ukraine.

Back in the day, some analysts prophesied a “convergence” between the Soviet Union and the United States, two industrial societies becoming more alike. In our day, there is indeed a growing similarity: In both places, post-factual politics are normal.

George Will’s syndicated column appears Thursdays and Sundays in the Tribune-Herald. His email address is georgewill@washpost.com.
The European Union extends the asset freeze and travel ban against 146 persons and 37 entities, including close associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin, by six months until 15 March 2017 for the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.