U.S. and Allies To Announce New Russia Sanctions, And Crack Down On Evasion

President Joe Biden and U.S. allies will unveil new sanctions against Russia this week, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said on Tuesday.

White House didn’t provide details about specific sanctions, as it didn’t want to get ahead of Thursday’s expected announcement, TURAN’s Washington correspondent reports.

In the meantime, administration officials familiar with the matter told reporters that new sanctions will target more than 300 hundreds of Russians serving in Duma, the country’s lower legislative body.

The U.S, and allies are also planning to tighten the existing sanctions to crack down on evasion and to ensure robust enforcement, Sullivan said ahead of Biden’s trip to Brussels.

“What I will say is that one of the key elements of that announcement will focus not just on adding new sanctions, but on ensuring that there is joint effort to crack down on evasion, on sanctions busting, on any attempt by any country to help Russia basically undermine, weaken, or get around the sanctions. That is an important part of this next phase” Sullivan said.

Biden is slated to attend an emergency NATO summit this week, as well as to meet with the other G7 leaders and to address a European Council summit on Thursday in Belgium. He’ll also travel to Poland on Friday to meet with President Andrzej Duda.

Speaking to reporters at the White House, national security adviser Sullivan also said that Biden is planning to announce a new joint action on enhancing European energy security as well as new U.S. contributions to a humanitarian response to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Asked whether Hungary’s reluctance on imposing a ban on importing Russian oil and gas weakens the sanctions, Sullivan said, when the U.S imposed its energy sanctions, it “recognized” that some of its European Allies and partners would not be able to follow suit, and that Biden not going to pressure them to do so.

“From his perspective, what we have achieved with our European partners -- in terms of financial sanctions, export controls, and other measures to hit the Russian economy hard -- have had unprecedented impact on a large economy at a scale we have never seen before,” he said.

Biden, he said, believes that “that is in fact increasing the costs on Russia; it is sharpening the choice for Russia.  And he feels very good about where things stand today in terms of the unity and resolve of the Western alliance on sanctions”

U.S. energy secretary Jennifer Granholm, in her turn, told reporters on Tuesday that one of Washington’s objectives during its dialogues with European allies this week was to reduce energy dependency from “autocrats who are weaponizing fossil energy.”

“The world is sending us clear signals. We have to do everything in our power to address the immediate needs of our people, but the truth is, only clean energy offers us a viable medium- and long-term solution to these kinds of challenges” she said ahead of her trip to Paris where she will attend the International Energy Agency Ministerial.

“Clean energy is reliable. It is diverse. It is affordable. Solar, for instance, is cheaper than fossil fuels in most parts of the world. It is the key to greater energy security, to greater energy independence. It’s the answer to both climate change and autocrats who are weaponizing fossil energy,” Secretary Granholm said during a press briefing organized by the State Department’s Brussels Media Hub.

“The urgent need to speed up the clean energy transition obviously has never been clearer, that this meeting of the IEA is going to reflect that urgency”- she explained. “Our theme is the Year of Implementation: Accelerating Global Action on Clean Energy and Energy Security. And our conversations are going to center on immediate actionable steps that IEA members can take, both individually and collectively, to raise our ambitions, to advance our goals, and to create millions of good-paying jobs in the process”

Alex Raufoglu

Washington D.C.