If introduced, it is unclear how the EU ban would affect
Russia, because top cloud providers in Europe are US companies, including
Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
The European Union last week adopted a new package of
sanctions against Russia and Belarus which included an oil embargo, restrictive
measures on Russian banks and a ban on the provision of consultancy services to
Moscow.
An initial version of a press release on the sanctions
package issued by the EU Council on June 3 also referred to a ban on the provision
of cloud services, but was later amended to delete that reference. That
sanction does not appear in the legal texts published in the official journal
of the EU.
A press officer for the Council said the initial mention of
the sanction on cloud services was "a material error", and declined
to say whether it may have been caused by a debate on the matter among EU
states.
An EU official familiar with decisions on sanctions said the
measure on cloud services was never proposed by the European Commission, but
added that the EU was working on introducing the ban in possible future rounds
of sanctions despite it being technically difficult.
In a tweet on Tuesday, the Ukrainian president's adviser
Mykhailo Podolyak said that the editing of the press release by the EU Council
had been done without offering a clear explanation and that it suggested a
possible watering down of sanctions.
"We must increase the sanctions pressure, not
decrease," he said. © Reuters
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