The Trump administration imposed new sanctions on seven of Russia’s richest men and 17 top government officials on Friday in the latest effort to punish President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle for interference in the 2016 election and other Russian aggressions, The New York Times reported.
The sanctions are designed to penalize some of Russia’s richest industrialists, who are seen in the West as enriching themselves from Putin’s increasingly authoritarian administration. The latest notion prevents the oligarchs from traveling to the United States or doing business or even opening a bank account with any major company or bank in the West, while it also restricts foreign individuals from facilitating transactions on their behalf.
According to Elizabeth Rosenberg, a former sanctions official in the Obama administration, the penalties are as “fairly muscular”, predicting that more sanctions are probably coming.
Friday’s list targets Putin’s inner circle, as it imposes sanctions on a family member, his son-in-law Kirill Shamalov, who has had close business ties to one of Putin’s longtime friends from St. Petersburg, Gennady Timchenko. It also penalizes people like Vladimir Bogdanov, the director general of Surgutneftegas, a large privately owned oil company that has long been rumored, without solid evidence, to have given an ownership stake to Putin, The New York Times adds.
The list is an assault on one of the oligarchs’ favored tools for avoiding sanctions, which is to pass assets to their children, as it targeted the oil executive Igor Rotenberg, the son of Arkady Rotenberg, who is a former judo partner of Putin and whose companies have won a host of state contracts, including one for the construction of a bridge from the Russian mainland to Crimea, the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula seized by Moscow in 2014.
Also on the list is Oleg V. Deripaska, who once had close ties to Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort. Altogether, the Trump administration targeted seven oligarchs, 12 companies they own or control, 17 Russian government officials and a state-owned arms export company.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry promised a “harsh response” and described Washington’s increasing use of sanctions as economically anti-competitive.
“The Russian government operates for the disproportionate benefit of oligarchs and government elites. Russian oligarchs and elites who profit from this corrupt system will no longer be insulated from the consequences of their government’s destabilizing activities,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said.
The sanctions come just as investigators working for Robert Mueller have begun to question Russian oligarchs about possible financial links between those in Putin’s orbit and people close to Trump.
Be the first to comment