Ukraine extends or applies sanctions on over 400 individuals, 90 legal

The list includes a number of journalists, including three BBC employees based in Moscow and reporters for Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper and several Spanish outlets, as well as some Israeli correspondents.

In response, BBC’s foreign editor Andrew Roy said: “This is a shameful attack on media freedom”.

A decision by rebels in eastern Ukraine to hold elections poses a “great danger” to the peace process, President Petro Poroshenko has warned.

Poroshenko’s spokesman tweeted that the president had signed a law enacting targeted measures against 400 officials and 90 companies.

The Committee to Protect Journalists expressed dismay on Thursday at Ukraine’s decision to ban dozens of mostly Western journalists on a new list of extended sanctions, a move that is likely to alienate foreign lenders and investors. It was unclear exactly what had triggered the ban.

The former Harmony member and current journalist on the sanctions list is Nikolajs Kabanovs, who has previously been elected to the Latvian parliament on more than one occasion.

“I have never been to Ukraine and don’t have any intention of traveling there in the near future”, Michael Rutz, a German journalist and author, told German news agency dpa.

But after Kyiv postponed the polls due to security and monitoring concerns, pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk said the would hold their own ballot on October 18, a week before the rest of the country.

Ukraine expects to reach a new winter gas deal with Moscow by the end of the next week, its energy minister said on Tuesday, adding that he saw $220 per 1,000 cubic metres as an acceptable price for supplies from Russia.

Poroshenko said the companies and individuals were also held responsible for Moscow’s annexation of Crimea. The decree said that all the journalists on the list were an unspecified security threat.

The United States, Britain and France, which also have veto power on the Security Council, have criticized previous blocking votes by Russia and by China, especially those that have prevented the Council from imposing sanctions on the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad.