U.S. releases ‘Putin list’ of Russians who have thrived under leader
Democrat decries lack of penalties for powerful
President Trump’s administration released a list of Russian politicians and oligarchs who have “flourished” under President Vladimir Putin.
The 114 senior politicians and 96 oligarchs appeared on the “Putin list” after a demand by Congress that the United States punish Russia for allegedly interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The list was delivered late Monday, shortly before midnight, the Congress-imposed deadline.
Those on the document include Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov, oligarchs Roman Abramovich and Mikhail Prokhorov — who challenged Putin in the 2012 election — and officials in the FSB and GRU spy agencies.
Aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, a figure in the Russia investigation over his ties to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, also made the list.
The Treasury Department said each of the oligarchs is believed to have assets totaling $1 billion or more. The list of oligarchs is a copy of Forbes magazine’s ranking of Russian billionaires, arranged alphabetically.
The Treasury acknowledged that the unclassified list of oligarchs was “drawn from publicly available sources,” according to the Associated Press.
The Trump administration announced that nobody will be punished — for now — under sanctions over the alleged election-meddling. Some U.S. lawmakers said Trump gave a free pass to those on the list.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin “isn’t even going through the motions” of creating a reliable, public list to “name and shame” Russian oligarchs closest to Putin.
“Mr. Mnuchin’s lack of seriousness and subsequent refusal to take immediate action is both reckless and a dereliction of duty,” Wyden said.
He said “significant information from the classified annex could be declassified” and called for that process to begin immediately.
Mnuchin, testifying before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, defended the classified version of the report. “It is hundreds of pages, and there will be sanctions that come out of this report,” Mnuchin said.
Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote to Mnuchin that the report “does raise the obvious question” of whether to sanction individuals on the list who are not already under U.S. sanctions.
While officials consider sanctions, the State Department said Tuesday it took action to block Russian arms deals, costing Putin’s government billions of dollars in business with other countries.
“We estimate that foreign governments have abandoned planned or announced purchases of several billion dollars in Russian defense acquisitions,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement. The State Department would not identify the countries where those deals fell through, citing the sensitivity of the issue.
Being on the “Putin list” doesn’t trigger any U.S. sanctions on the individuals, although many are under earlier sanctions.
The Trump administration had until Monday to issue the list under a law passed last year. After declining to answer questions about it Monday, the Treasury Department released it with little fanfare 12 minutes before midnight.
Putin said the “hostile step” targeted all Russians, but his country would refrain from “tit-for-tat.”
“We expected this list, and I won’t hide that we were ready to take tit-fortat steps, rather serious ones, which could reduce our relations to zero. But we will refrain from these steps now,” he said, according to Russia’s TASS news agency.
The Kremlin is likely to interpret the Trump administration’s actions as weak, said Steven Hall, the CIA’s former chief of Moscow operations.