[JURIST] The EU General Court [official website] on Thursday upheld sanctions [judgment] against former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych [BBC profile]. Following an uprising in 2014, Yanukovych fled to Russia, and the EU imposed sanctions for embezzlement and wrongdoing. Yanukovych successfully challenged the sanctions from March 2014 to March 2015 due to lack of evidence, but the court upheld the sanctions from March 2015 to March 2016. The EU has extended the sanctions to 2017, and Yanukovych’s lawyer says he plans to challenge [Reuters report] those sanctions as well.

Russia has also received financial sanctions from the EU. In June a senior adviser to the European Court of Justice submitted an advisory opinion [JURIST report] finding the July 2014 EU economic sanctions against Russia legally valid. In 2014 the Russian discount airline Dobrolet suspended all flights [JURIST report] as a result of the tightening EU sanctions. The EU responded that the airline’s service from Moscow to Crimea “facilitate[d] the integration of the illegally annexed Autonomous Republic of Crimea into the Russian Federation and undermines Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity.” The economic sanctions against Russia were expected to cause more damage to the Russian economy than those imposed earlier that year, though economists and analysts expected Western economies to be impacted by them as well. The sanctions targeted the country’s energy, banking and defense sectors and included a ban on the purchase or sale of new bonds, stocks or long-term debts from some Russian banks.