⁍ The EU vowed three weeks ago to impose sanctions on Belarus for alleged election fraud and human rights abuses.

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⁍ Cyprus will not agree to the Belarusian sanctions unless the EU also puts sanctions on its neighbour, Turkey.

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⁍ The deadlock comes a week before a summit of EU leaders that now risks being bogged down over whether to take a hard line with Turkey.

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– Three weeks ago, the European Union vowed to impose sanctions on Belarus for alleged election fraud and human rights abuses. Now, the plan has fallen into disarray, Reuters reports. The EU vowed three weeks ago to impose sanctions on Belarus for alleged election fraud and human rights abuses, but the consensus-driven union has been prevented from fulfilling that promise by one of its smallest members, Cyprus. Cyprus will not agree to the Belarusian sanctions unless the EU also puts sanctions on its neighbor, Turkey, in a separate row that has raised tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean. EU envoys sought in a meeting Wednesday to break the impasse, but the discussions failed, even as the bloc’s chief executive, Ursula von der Leyen, bemoaned in her State of the Union speech that EU diplomacy is too often paralyzed by a system that gives one country veto power over the other 26. “The EU is at risk of irrelevance, it is a threat to our credibility,” an EU official said. “We need to move to qualified majority voting on specific issues, human rights, sanctions.” The deadlock over Belarus sanctions comes a week before a summit of EU leaders that now risks being bogged down over whether to take a hard line with Turkey. Cyprus says it cannot support sanctions against Belarus officials on a list that was drawn up after the contested Aug. 9 election unless action is taken in parallel against Turkey. “We have no issues with imposing sanctions on Belarus but we consider that we had a political understanding for both processes to go forward in parallel,” a Cypriot diplomat tells Reuters.