Washington doesn’t want to give Moscow an opportunity to mitigate in advance the sanctions the United States plans to impose were Russia to invade Ukraine so it’s keeping the planned measures completely secret, US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland said on Sunday.
The senior American official told CBS that the Biden administration is working on a package of sanctions that would potentially be imposed on Russia but would not be letting details beforehand.
Nuland explained that deterrence is best when there’s a little bit of strategic ambiguity around the exact measures outlining only that there will be financial measures, export controls, new sanctions on Russian elites, etc.
According to various reports, the sanctions will focus on Russian banks and the export and import of certain goods and are designed to deter Moscow from considering a military incursion into Ukraine.
Nuland said that they’re working intensively with Congress and the European Union to develop a multilateral response – that would most probably take aim at the energy industry- that will be very well aligned with what the US is building with its NATO allies and partners.”
According to Washington, Nuland’s statement on the package of measures comes in light of the report that a bipartisan group of US lawmakers led by Democratic Senator Bob Menendez is close to agreeing on a set of sanctions that might be implemented immediately after any Russian invasion into Ukraine.
Even though Moscow continuously denied planning any attack on Ukraine and even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has downplayed such an idea, many are alleging that Moscow’s massing of 100,000 troops on the border is part of its planned attack.
Nuland believes that the US has to be prepared for all options since Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has given himself every option, including a massive potential invasion of all of Ukraine, possible cyber-attacks, or even incursion from Belarus, where Moscow has moved up to 30.000 troops there as well.
Be the first to comment