The European Commission yesterday turned to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to settle a year-long dispute over Russia’s imposition of import tariffs on Italian and German vans and other light commercial vehicles.

This is the third dispute with Russia that the European Union has referred to the WTO in the last twelve months, and the move came nine days after the EU launched a robust critique of Russian trade policy in Geneva.

Angelos Pangratis, the EU’s ambassador to the WTO, on 12 May accused Russia of repeatedly breaching commitments that it made when it finally joined the WTO in 2012, after almost 19 years of negotiations. Pangratis said that Russia’s rule-breaking was “an issue of systemic importance”, continuing: “A WTO member cannot serially fail to respect its obligations without undermining the rules-based multilateral system we all believe in.”

The van battle was triggered last May when the Eurasian Economic Commission – the executive body that controls the customs union between Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan – accused German and Italian producers of selling their vehicles at cut price on the Russian market. Russia also imposed tariffs on Turkish manufacturers.

Another dispute that the WTO is now considering relates to Russia’s imposition of fees for the recycling of imported cars, a fee also applied to non-European cars. The third contentious step by Russia – a ban on imports of pig meat – was specific to the EU.

Russia has filed two complaints with the WTO against the EU. In January, it challenged levies imposed on Russian producers of steel and ammonium nitrate in reprisal for selling at ‘dumping’ prices on the European market. On 1 May, it referred a recurrent objection to the ownership rules in the EU’s ‘third energy package’.
All the cases remain unresolved.