Sanctions target elite Russians
WASHINGTON — In the latest sign of plummeting relations with Moscow, the Trump administration slapped new sanctions Friday on seven Russian oligarchs with close ties to the Kremlin, including President Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law, for what a U.S. official called “attacks to subvert Western democracies.”
The administration’s long-delayed move against Russia’s ruling elite, mandated by Congress last year to punish Moscow for its meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections, also included targeted sanctions against 12 Russian companies and 17 senior government officials.
The direct assault on Putin’s inner circle seemed to signal an end, at least for now, to President
Donald Trump’s persistent efforts to revive moribund U.S. relations with Moscow despite growing warnings by U.S. intelligence officials the Kremlin will try to interfere in the November elections.
Retaliations increase
The blacklist was issued a week after the United States and two dozen other countries expelled about 150 Russian diplomats, alleged to be intelligence operatives, in retaliation for the nerve gas poisoning of a former Russian double agent and his daughter in southern England last month.
Putin’s government, which has denied responsibility for the attack, responded by expelling a similar number of U.S. and other diplomats in the kind of crude titfor-tat clash not seen since the Cold War. Dozens of U.S. diplomats and their families left Moscow on Thursday.
Trump has been reluctant to publicly criticize Putin, even inviting him to the White House in a phone call March 20, although no summit has been scheduled. Trump did not publicly mention the new sanctions Friday.
But the White House took a stronger line Friday, signaling the olive branch has been withdrawn.
“What we would like to see is the totality of the Russian behavior change,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House spokeswoman, told reporters.
Asked whether Trump agreed, Sanders said the president “has signed off and directed these actions. I think that that speaks volumes, actually, on how the president feels.”
A senior administration official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity, said Trump seeks a “better relationship” with Russia. “That can only happen when Russia curbs its aggressive behavior. Actions have consequences.”
McMaster hints at action
The abruptly tougher tone by the White House was previewed this week in a speech by H.R. McMaster, the outgoing national security adviser.
“So for too long some nations have looked the other way in the face of these threats,” he said Tuesday at the Atlantic Council, a foreign policy think tank. “Russia brazenly and implausibly denies its actions. And we have failed to impose sufficient costs.”
The push comes as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III investigates Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign, and any potential illegal ties between Trump’s campaign and Russian authorities. Mueller recently obtained criminal indictments against 13 Russians, including several of those on the latest blacklist.
“Russian oligarchs and elites who profit from this corrupt system will no longer be insulated from the consequences of their government’s destabilizing activities,” Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin said.
Mnuchin criticized Putin’s government for engaging in “a range of malign activity around the globe,” including its occupation of Crimea and military operations in eastern Ukraine, its military support for Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces in that country’s brutal civil war, as well as “attempting to subvert Western democracies, and malicious cyber activities.”
In March, the administration levied sanctions against 16 Russian entities and individuals, as well as Russian intelligence agencies and officials.
The new measures stand out because they go after the pocketbooks of some of Russia’s wealthiest businessmen, including some of Putin’s closest advisers and supporters.