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The United States’ sanctions on Russia over its instigation of the war with Ukraine have a tendency to dominate any discussion of Kyiv and Moscow’s relations with the West.

One little known, but crucial player in the game of enforcing sanctions on Russia is the U.S. Treasury. Adam Szubin, the Treasury’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, was in Kyiv last week meeting with top Ukrainian officials for discussions about the maintenance of sanctions against Russia, as well as ongoing efforts to return assets looted when former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was in power.

Szubin’s visit came amid wavering European solidarity on maintaining sanctions against Russia, as well as increased violence in the war in Donbas. Many Western governments have grown exhausted with Ukraine’s continued failure to establish rule of law, specifically on cases relating to corruption, leading some in Kyiv and Washington to call for the United States to sanction corrupt Ukrainian officials.

“The most important thing is for the Ukrainian government to hold corrupt Ukrainian officials responsible,” Szubin said in response to the proposal. “It has to come from here.”

Punishing bad behavior

The United States first began to apply sanctions in the last days of the EuroMaidan Revolution, freezing the accounts and banning business with officials associated with the Yanukovych regime’s violence against anti-government protesters.

Russia’s illegal annexation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea brought an additional wave of sanctions, both on top Russian officials deemed to be close to President Vladimir Putin and their preferred financial institutions. U.S. companies and individuals were also prohibited from doing business on the occupied peninsula.

From there, Russia launched its intervention -– and later invasion – in Ukraine’s east, sparking the so-called sectoral sanctions that ban dealings with equity and long-term debt in certain areas of the Russian economy.

But given that both Szubin and his boss, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, have described the purpose of sanctions as “changing behavior,” the short history of sanctions against Russia does not read like a success.

Szubin argued that the success of sanctions is “only visible in hindsight.”

“When you’re in the game of applying sanctions, you’re looking at indirect proxy indicators for whether the sanctions are weighing on the decision-making calculus,” he said. “That’s to me how I measure sanctions, until you see that ultimate success.”

Szubin, who told the BBC in January that U.S. government has had evidence of Vladimir Putin’s corruption for “many, many years,” told the Kyiv Post that “you could say that our sanctions against the oligarchs are an indirect reflection of a pattern of behavior, because it involves our people who are, let’s say, high school friends, childhood friends of the president.”

“What does that say about the system?”

Limited resources

In spite of tough talk about targeting and hitting those closest to the Russian president, Szubin said that limited resources mean that only egregious violations can be punished.

“It’s a relatively small office, and there are going to be hundreds if not thousands of sanctions violations that we come upon in a given year,” he said. “The triage is done based on the gravity of the violation.”

Though OFAC does have its own investigative resources, Szubin said that it relies on other sources, including the U.S. intelligence community to “start getting ready” should there be a “greater likelihood” that more sanctions will be necessary.

Szubin went on to say that there’s a danger in over-application, in that “use of the sanctions tool lightly” without exploring other forms of foreign policy pressure would be a “problem.”

Asked if the proposal to sanction corrupt Ukrainian officials would constitute an example of such an over-application, Szubin replied, “I’m not going to comment on hypothetical new sanctions programs.”

The meetings in Kyiv, Szubin said, had been marked both by stated commitments to fighting corruption in Ukraine and by at least one gift – Szubin arrived at the meeting with a copy of Borys Lozhkin’s “The Fourth Republic,” saying the Presidential Administration chief had given it to him at a meeting.

“The work that’s going on in the prosecutor general’s office to open cases and hold people responsible,” Szubin said, “the efforts to freeze and ultimately forfeit corrupt assets so that they can be returned to the people of Ukraine – I think that’s going to need to be where the success will be had.”