MOSCOW (Sputnik) — A French National Assembly Foreign Affairs Committee member said on Friday that he wanted to propose that the country's parliament vote on whether the sanctions against Russia were necessary.
On Thursday, a source from the European Council told RIA Novosti that the issue of extending the EU sanctions against Russia had been added to the agenda for the EU summit on December 18.
"It is a very high probability that sanctions against Russia will be extended today. From my side, I intend to propose to the French parliament a resolution that will allow to vote on the expediency of these sanctions," Thierry Mariani told reporters.
He added that the sanctions had not achieved their intended political objectives, but instead had only done a lot of harm to the economies of both the EU member states and Russia.
Both the European Union and the United States imposed several rounds of sanctions against Moscow, following the reunification of Crimea with Russia in 2014 and the escalation of the Ukrainian crisis later that year.