U.S. places sanctions on Russian oligarchs, officials
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration took its sternest action to date in response to Russia’s global aggression, imposing sanctions that freeze the U.S. assets of seven Russian oligarchs and 17 Russian government officials, including a top banker and Putin ally facing FBI scrutiny for his ties to the National Rifle Association.
McClatchy reported in late January that the bureau was investigating whether Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of Russia’s central bank and a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, funneled money to the NRA so the gun rights group could beef up its hefty spending to aid Donald Trump’s presidential bid.
Also among those sanctioned are several Russian figures with ties to Trump’s inner circle or whose names have arisen in connection with Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller’s broad probe into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. election campaign.
One of those is a senior member of Russia’s parliament, Konstantin Kosachev, whom a former British spy identified while researching Trump’s Russian connections during the campaign. Ex-spy Christopher Steele reported in his now-famous Trump dossier that Kosachev was the Kremlin’s representative at a supposed clandestine, late-summer 2016 meeting with Trump’s lawyer to discuss how to conceal Russia’s efforts to help the real estate magnate defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton. Both Kosachev and the lawyer, Michael Cohen, have strongly denied that the meeting happened.
Kosachev called the U.S. announcement “another unjustified, unfriendly and meaningless step,” state-run media RIA-Novosti reported. “This is the way to nowhere. Russia cannot be frightened by it and especially cannot be broken by it,” Kosachev said.
Billionaire aluminum tycoon Oleg Deripaska, who is close to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, is also on the list. Emails revealed during parallel investigations by Mueller and the House and Senate Intelligence Committees showed that former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort, who reaped millions in fees as a longtime consultant in Ukraine, offered through an intermediary to provide Deripaska briefings on the campaign’s progress; at the time, Manafort was hugely in debt to the oligarch. Deripaska has denied ever receiving any such briefings.
Deripaska gained unwanted attention recently when a widely circulated video showed him hosting Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko on his private yacht, accompanied by several call girls, in August 2016, just weeks after Manafort offered to provide campaign briefings.
The sanctions, which also targeted businesses of Deripaska and other oligarchs, were not a hastily conceived strike by the administration. Rather, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control and other administration officials began working on them even before Trump took office.
A senior administration official told reporters that the sanctions were not in reaction to a single Russian act but to several, including Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and efforts to help the Assad regime in Syria and hurt democracies around the globe.
They were “in response to the totality of the Russian government’s ongoing and increasingly brazen pattern of malign activity around the world,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the matter is sensitive.
“We cannot allow those seeking to sow confusion, discord and rancor to be successful,” Trump said in a statement released by the White House. Until recently, Trump persistently dismissed criticisms of Russia, and even while agreeing to the latest sanctions, he invited Putin on a March 20 phone call to meet with him at the White House.
The sanctions also target Russian energy interests, such as Putin’s sonin-law, Kirill Shamalov; he suddenly became an oil and gas exploration tycoon after marrying Putin’s daughter, Katerina Tikhonova. U.S. investigators have charged that Russia has worked to impede the expansion of American oil and gas development; the United States could top Russia within a year or two as the world’s leading energy producer.
“The sanctioning of oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska, who is linked to Paul Manafort, Alexander Torshin, and Putin’s son-in-law will send a strong message to the Kremlin,” said Rep. Adam Schiff of California, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “By isolating Putin’s regime and financially punishing his support base among the oligarchs, we may be able to induce a change in Moscow’s behavior — if not, we will have to explore other options to pressure the Kremlin to chart a new direction.”