Brussels Edition: Stern Words, No Action

Welcome to the Brussels Edition, Bloomberg’s daily briefing on what matters most in the heart of the European Union.

EU foreign ministers will do plenty of jawboning today, but take no concrete action when they address Russia’s controversial jailing of opposition leader Alexey Navalny. While the bloc is armed with a new, streamlined tool for blacklisting foreign officials over human-rights violations, such sanctions still require the unanimous support of the EU’s 27 national governments and Germany opposes any hasty moves. The result: after protests swept Russia over the weekend, the in-person ministerial meeting in Brussels will amount to a political temperature-taking exercise and it’ll likely be left to EU leaders in March to weigh asset freezes and travel bans against authorities implicated in Navalny’s detention. It took the EU two months until mid-October last year to blacklist six allies of Russian President Vladimir Putin over the attempted murder of Navalny with a military-grade nerve agent.