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services as well as six defence companies active in Crimea peninsula, "several of which misappropriated Ukrainian state assets to provide services to the Russian military". The EU sanctions target eight senior Russian security personnel and military officers responsible for detaining three Ukrainian vessels in disputed waters off the coast of the annexed Crimea. Twenty-four Ukrainian sailors are still in detention after being taken into custody when the ships were fired upon and then seized on November 2018. Canada imposed sanctions on 15 entities and 114 individuals.
United States ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch has called on the Ukrainian authorities to dismiss head of the nation's recently-created Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAPO) Nazar Kholodnytsky. "To ensure the integrity of anticorruption institutions, the Special Anticorruption Prosecutor must be replaced," Yovanovitch said on March 5, according to a transcript published by the embassy's media office the next day. "Nobody who has been recorded coaching suspects on how to avoid corruption charges can be trusted to prosecute those very same cases." The SAPO and another main anti-corruption agency, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), were created around three years ago at the request of Western donors and backers, which wanted independent agencies investigating crimes of corruption and prosecuting them.
The European Parliament has adopted a resolution assessing the current state of EU-Russia political relations on March 12, which stepped up the harsh rhetoric against Russia and underlined the need for energy independence that could pose risks to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. While the full text of the resolution has not been published, the press-release notes that "EU should stand ready to adopt further sanctions against Russia, especially those targeting individuals". On the energy side, the MEPs reiterated the concern that the Nord Stream-2 pipeline could reinforce the EU‘s dependence on Russian gas supplies and threaten the EU internal market. Analysts surveyed by Vedomosti d aily believe that the resolution carries no immediate danger to Nord Stream. The pipeline could be directly challenged only by the amendments on the European Gas Directive curbing the capacity of the pipeline , as well as harsher US sanctions. Besides the energy safety, The MEPs note that new areas of tension between the EU and Russia have arisen since 2015, including Russia’s intervention in Syria, interference in countries such as Libya and the Central African Republic, and continuous aggressive action in Ukraine. The resolution also highlights Russia’s support for anti-EU parties and far-right movements, as well as election meddling and domestic human rights violations. The document also calls the EU to review its current Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) with Russia and limit cooperation to areas of common interest, pegging it to full implementation of the Minsk agreements on normalisation of the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers approved the provision on tax and customs services . The decision was taken at a government meeting this Wednesday. In December 2018, the government decided to divide the State Fiscal Service into the State Tax Service and the State Customs Service into two separate central executive bodies. It is assumed that the State Tax Service will implement tax policy. The State Customs Service, in turn, will be responsible for the observance of customs legislation. As noted in the explanatory note to the draft resolution, the main goal is to regulate the activities of these two services, to recognize their legal status, basic rights and obligations of employees.
15 UKRAINE Country Report April 2019 www.intellinews.com