Moscow - Germany's business and political leaders are lining up to support a tougher stance on Russia and they are ready to back the imposing of tough measures, despite possible economic losses, the Bloomberg agency has reported, referring to statements of heads of business associations.
“This shooting down of a plane [of Malaysia Airlines over Donetsk
region] is really a turning point,” Martin Wansleben, head of the
Association of German Chambers of Commerce and Industry, said in an
interview. “It’s such an outrageous act that one must give a clear
response.”
“As painful as further economic sanctions will be for European
business development, for German exports and for individual companies,
they cannot and must not be ruled out as a way to apply pressure on the
Russian government,” Ulrich Grillo, the head of the Federation of German
Industry (BDI), said in the article for Handelsblatt newspaper.
“In light of the latest escalation, new sanctions were virtually
unavoidable,” the head of the German Engineering Federation, Hannes
Hesse, told Bloomberg.
On Tuesday, July 29, the European Union member states have reached an
agreement over introduction of sectoral sanctions against Russia. These
measures will “limit access to EU capital markets for Russian
state-owned financial institutions, impose an embargo on trade in arms,
establish an export ban for dual use goods for military end users, and
curtail Russian access to sensitive technologies particularly in the
field of the oil sector.”
