Serbia has been handed more time to find a buyer for the Russian stake in its only oil refinery and avoid US sanctions, a temporary reprieve to a crisis that has threatened to bring economic chaos in the Balkan country.
“We succeeded,” President Aleksandar Vu?i? said in a social media post on Friday, after the US Treasury unexpectedly granted a 30-day extension to a deadline for Russian state-owned Gazprom and its subsidiary to sell their majority holding in Serbia’s NIS refinery.
The US Treasury had warned that it would impose sanctions unless the Russian owners sold the stake as part of Washington’s efforts to target Moscow’s primary sources of revenue. The original deadline expired in February, and the second deadline loomed on Friday before the US granted an extension.