100 days in, West ups ante

US and EU continue to levy new sanctions on Moscow in their effort to punish it for the Ukraine invasion

Agencies

WASHINGTON: The Biden administration on Thursday issued a raft of new sanctions aimed a punishing Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, with targets including several yachts linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin, a yacht brokerage and a cellist it says acts as a middleman for the Russian leader. The US and other Western countries have so far imposed unprecedented sanctions on Russia’s economy, including the country’s central bank and major financial institutions.

The latest sanctions targeted 16 entities, seven vessels and three aircraft, the notice said. The Biden administration also added Sergei Roldugin, a cellist and conductor already under European Union sanctions for his links to Putin, to its list of sanctioned individuals. The order froze his US assets and barred people in the US from dealing with them.

The state department also imposed sanctions on five Russian oligarchs and members of the country’s elite, including the spokesperson for the

Russian ministry foreign affairs, Maria Zakharova.

European Union diplomats gave a final approval to the bloc’s sixth round of sanctions against Russia for invading Ukraine, a diplomat told Reuters.

The sanctions include a partial oil ban and will remove Russia’s top lender Sberbank from the international platform SWIFT. They come after Hungary repeatedly denied the bloc the necessary unanimity of the 27 EU countries by escalating its national demands.

On Thursday, the diplomat said, the agreement was finally possible after the other 26 countries agreed to remove from the proposed blacklist the head of the Russian Orthodox church and a close Kremlin ally, Patriarch Kiryll, to appease Budapest. The agreement comes into force at 12:30pm (IST) today, unless a member state raises objections, said the diplomat. Legal imposition of the sanctions would t hen follow soon after.

Britain pledged on Thursday to send sophisticated medium-range rocket systems to Ukraine, joining the US and Germany in equipping the embattled nation.

The Kremlin warned of “absolutely undesirable and rather unpleasant scenarios” if the latest Western-supplied weapons are fired into Russia.

“This pumping of Ukraine with weapons ... will bring more suffering to Ukraine, which is merely a tool in the hands of those countries that supply it with weapons,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.