EU nations have become pawns and accessories to US economic terrorism: Analyst

The European Union is too economically and politically dependent on the United States and has turned into a pawn and accessory to America’s economic terrorism against other countries, a US political analyst says.

EU lawmakers accuse the United States of exacerbating the coronavirus crisis through sanctions Washington is imposing on nations around the world.

During a debate in the European Parliament, Brussels legislators also called for great cooperation between EU member states with a view to curtailing the international public health emergency.

“The European Union and European countries themselves also shoulder the blame, as they have allowed their economies and their countries to be dependent domestic nations on the United States,” said Rodney Martin, a former congressional staffer based in Arizona.

“They are going to have to sever their economic interests and their economies from being so heavily dependent on the United States, and thereby allowing the United States to economically blackmail them into being pawns of United States economic terrorism,” Martin told Press TV on Thursday.

“European countries know that the sanctions against Iran are unjust and are preventing Iran from purchasing medical equipment, medicines and essential materials to combat the coronavirus, yet they are o heavily dependent on the US economy and the US dollar that they have become pawns and accessories to economic terrorism,” he added.

US sanctions condemned amid Coronavirus crisis

EU lawmakers accuse the United States of exacerbating the Coronavirus crisis through sanctions Washington is imposing on nations around the world.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has written a letter to the United Nations secretary general, urging lifting of the unilateral and illegal sanctions imposed by the United States on the country, which have greatly hampered the Islamic Republic’s fight against the new coronavirus epidemic.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Abbas Mousavi, reported the letter in a tweet on Thursday, saying that copies of the letter addressed to Antonio Guterres were also sent to the heads of international organizations and Zarif’s counterparts across the world.

The novel coronavirus, or COVID-19, is a new respiratory disease first identified in the central Chinese city of Wuhan late last year. The World Health Organization on Wednesday described the outbreak as a pandemic.

More than 126,000 people have been infected by the virus across the world and 4,630 have died, the vast majority of them in China, according to a Reuters tally.

Iran’s Health Ministry spokesman Kianush Jahanpur told state television on Thursday that 1,075 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 have been detected across the country in the last 24 hours, which brings the total number of infected people to 10,075. He also put the death toll at 429.

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