Foreign and European Affairs Minister Gordan Grlic-Radman said on Monday that Croatia supported the enlargement of the European Union to the Western Balkans and that it was crucial for Western Balkan countries to align with the EU foreign and security policy.

“Croatia strongly supports EU enlargement to the Western Balkans, and it calls on the (EU membership) aspirants to promote cooperation, good-neighbourly relations and respect for European values. Their adjustment to the EU foreign and security policy in crucial in this respect,” Grlic-Radman said before the start of a two-day meeting of the EU Foreign Affairs Council (FAC) in Brussels.

The FAC, to be chaired by the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, will exchange views on the Western Balkans, among other things, and will discuss the new, 11th package of sanctions against Russia over its war of aggression on Ukraine.

The foreign ministers of the EU membership aspirants from the Western Balkans will join the meeting.

The EU foreign affairs ministers will have an informal discussion over lunch with their counterparts from the six countries in the region.

Serbia is the sole country among those aspirants that is refusing to impose sanctions on Russia.

That will be one of the central topics of the EU foreign ministers’ meeting. In recent weeks, the EU has been discussing an eleventh set of sanctions against Russia focusing on how to prevent the sanctions imposed thus far from being circumvented.

European diplomats are also trying to compile a list of private companies helping Russia circumvent the sanctions and to expand the list of sanctioned Russian officials responsible for the imprisonment of political dissidents.

The EU is also drawing up a decision on paying €500 million from the European Peace Facility to the member states which have supplied Ukraine with their ammunition.

Hungary’s position on new sanctions

The decisions made by the FAC should be made unanimously. Hungary is still blocking some decisions, insisting that its OTP bank should be removed from the list of “sponsors of the war”. Ukraine claims that the Russian branch of the OTP bank still provides Russia’s army with favourable loans and that its document recognise Crimea as part of Russia.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto is threatening to block the new sanctions against Russia for as long as OTP remains blacklisted.