WASHINGTON: The United States and its Western allies said they have imposed “new, severe and immediate economic sanctions” against Russia, banning American investment there, fully blocking the country’s largest financial institutions and targeting assets held by President Vladimir Putin’s adult children.
“Together with our allies and our partners, we’re going to keep raising economic costs, to ratchet up the pain for Putin and further increase Russia’s economic isolation,” President Joe Biden said during remarks at a North America’s Building Trades Unions event.
The new measures, according to the White House, are in retribution for atrocities against Ukrainian civilians allegedly committed by Russian troops, including those discovered in recent days in Bucha, a suburb of the capital, Kyiv.
The Russian military withdrew from the region while heightening its attacks on cities in southern and eastern Ukraine.
Biden said horrific images from Bucha, where dead civilians were left on the street, imparted “a sense of brutality and inhumanity left for all the world to see,” as he outlined the steps his administration is taking to punish those responsible. Russia has denied killing civilians in Bucha.
The most punishing of the new measures are the “full blocking sanctions” on Sberbank, Russia’s largest financial institution, and the country’s largest private bank, Alfa Bank.
Applying full blocking sanctions against Russia’s largest bank takes U.S. measures against the Russian financial sector to their maximum level, said Andrew Lohsen, a fellow in the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies to VOA.
Until now, the Biden administration had refrained from applying the same restrictions on Sberbank as it had on other Russian banks because Sberbank is one of the main institutions handling energy payments.
“That seems to have changed as images from Bucha are circulating around the world,” Lohsen said. “The aversion to carve-outs is eroding, as evidence of Russian atrocities in Ukraine comes to light.”
(VOA)
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