In its first announcement of the new year, the Council of the European Union (of which Belgium holds the presidency) on Wednesday added a new "person and entity" to the list of EU sanctions; namely, Alrosa – the Russian diamond mining company. Alrosa's CEO Pavel Marinychev has also been sanctioned.
Concretely, this means that any assets belonging to either the company or its CEO will be frozen in the EU. Marinychev himself will be denied entry to the territory.
Alrosa is a public company and the largest diamond extractor in the world, accounting for 90% of Russian production. Already it had been affected by economic sanctions adopted by the EU in December, which now have been ratified and come into effect.
Antwerp is Europe's established diamond hub and central to the global trade in European precious stones. Belgium had previously expressed concerns that efforts to tighten up on the Russian trade would only lead Russia to trade elsewhere, therefore negatively affecting a major part of Belgium's economy and having negligible impact on Russia itself. Russia has by far the world's largest diamond reserves.
Related News
December saw the G7 introduce an embargo on uncut Russian diamonds, preventing them from buying, importing, or transferring the stones. More pertinently, from March a robust traceability-based verification and certification will come into force for diamonds traded around the world – a measure that Belgium had requested specifically as a means of verifying which stones comply with international sanctions.
In addition, from September 2024 the ban will apply to Russian diamonds cut in other countries. Today most stones are cut in India, after which it can be technically highly challenging to trace the provenance of a diamond.
Still, it remains to be seen how much Antwerp will be impacted by the measures and whether they will have the desired effect on Russia, which each year makes $4.5 billion by selling the stones.
