The West continues ratcheting up its sanctions regimen against Iran, as the now effectively collapsed efforts to restore the JCPOA nuclear deal are ever more distant in the rearview mirror, with the EU on Friday announcing fresh sanctions related to the ongoing protest crackdown in the wake of Mahsa Amini’s death in police custody months ago.

Europe is also taking aim at Iranian military supplies to Russia amid the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Iran has supplied suicide drones to the Russian military, which have seen increasing use against Ukrainian cities and national energy infrastructure. 

“The new measures will target around eight individuals and organizations involved in the manufacture and delivery of drones Moscow has used in the war on Ukraine,” according to European diplomats cited in AFP.

“Another 20 individuals and one organization will be added to the asset freeze and visa ban blacklist over the repression of demonstrations that have rocked the regime, officials said.”

This follows prior EU sanctions placed on two known drone manufacturers, as well the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). 

Further Tehran’s “morality” police and the interior minister are under sanctions – though it should be noted that days ago Tehran claimed to have disbanded the feared morality police as a good faith compromise with the activists. However, protesters have expressed skepticism, saying the government did no such thing.

On Thursday, Tehran authorities were met with international outrage as the judiciary conducted the first ever execution of a man based on charges related to the protests.

23-year old Mohsen Shekari was hanged after being convicted of wounding a government paramilitary officer. Specifically he stood accused of stabbing a Basij paramilitary officer in Tehran on September 23, amid a raging street protest.

France and Germany were among European governments to strongly condemn the execution, with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock saying that Shekari “was tried and executed in a perfidious rushed trial for disagreeing with the regime.”

“The Iranian regime’s inhumanity knows no bounds,” she tweeted. “But the threat of execution will not suffocate people’s desire for freedom.”