Among those targeted by sanctions is Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president, a former prime minister and one of Putin’s closest allies. Also included were Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and Minister of Justice Konstantin Chuchenko.
US officials said the new sanctions also targeted Russia’s Sberbank, which owns a third of Russia’s total banking assets, and AlphaBank, the country’s fourth-largest financial institution. But they said energy transactions are excluded from the latest measures.
“Everything that is happening is nothing less than major war crimes,” Biden said in a speech to labor leaders, in which he referred to the new sanctions on the two Russian banks and Russian businessmen, referring to the Ukrainian town of Bucha that was recaptured from Russian forces, where civilians were found. They were shot at close range.
“Countries that have a sense of responsibility must cooperate to hold these perpetrators to account. With our allies and partners, we will continue to raise the economic cost and increase the pain for Putin,” he added.
Russia denies targeting civilians and says it is conducting a “special military operation” in Ukraine that began on February 24. She said the photos of the dead were a “grotesque forgery” by the West.
The White House said in a statement that the “total embargo sanctions” issued on Wednesday will freeze the assets of the two major banks “that touch the American financial system.”
Britain also froze Sberbank’s assets and said it would ban imports of Russian coal by the end of this year in the latest package of sanctions coordinated with the United States and other Western allies aimed at what it called “the starvation of Putin’s war machine”.
Sberbank and Alpha Bank said the new sanctions would not have a significant impact on their operations.
The White House also indicated that Biden is signing an executive order to ban “new investment in Russia by Americans wherever they are, which will isolate Russia from the global economy.” Officials said that would include a ban on venture capital and mergers.
Soviet-style living standards
A senior US administration official told reporters that the United States, by isolating Russia’s largest banks, “significantly escalates” the financial shock to Russia.
“The reality is that the country is descending into economic, financial and technological isolation. At this rate, it will return to 1980s Soviet-style living standards,” the official added.
Brian Dees, director of the White House Economic Council, said that according to estimates, the Russian economy will contract by between 10 percent and 15 percent in 2022, bringing inflation in Russia to 200 percent.
Daniel Fried, the former coordinator for sanctions policy at the State Department in the Barack Obama administration, said the latest package “essentially makes Sberbank banned.” But he added, “What we’re missing is what we’re going to do about oil and gas,” Russia’s most lucrative export.
In the latest series of law enforcement actions against Russia, the US Justice Department has charged Russian businessman Konstantin Malofeev with violating sanctions imposed on Moscow after the war in Ukraine, saying he provided funding to Russians promoting separatism in Crimea.
Prosecutor Merrick Garland said authorities had also disrupted a type of malicious global computer network known as a “botnet” controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency.
In addition, Garland announced the department’s cooperation with prosecutors in Europe to begin collecting evidence of possible war crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine.
Seeking to increase pressure on Putin, the United States is also imposing sanctions with a complete embargo on what the White House has described as “major Russian state-owned companies,” which it said would harm the Kremlin’s ability to fund its war efforts.
Among those entities are United Aircraft and United Shipbuilding, Dess said.
Medvedev said earlier today, in a post on Telegram, that Moscow will fight attempts to seize Russian property abroad in courts around the world.
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