Political watchdogs are lukewarm about sanctions recently imposed against Russia by the United States.
Some deemed the sanctions too lenient. Others said that U. S. President Joe Biden just needs more time to strike harder.
“Let’s give the Biden administration a bit more time, please. Thank God (U. S. President Donald J.) Trump is gone, and to remove the damage he did will take years,” said Roland Freudenstein, policy director at Wilfried Martens Center for European Studies.
Regardless, the moves — tepid or not — send a signal to Russia that the U.S. will respond to the Kremlin’s totalitarian actions at home and abroad. Experts believe that even if the sanctions don’t cause strong economic damage to Russia, they will have a political impact. The Russian Foreign Ministry has already called the sanctions “a hostile move.”
“Sanctions rarely change someone else’s behavior by 180 degrees,” Freudenstein told the Kyiv Post.
“But without sanctions against Russia in 2014, Mariupol would not be a free city anymore,” he said of Russia’s military aggression in eastern Ukraine. “Putin then wanted his forces to push on. He stopped them because of the sanctions, and the threat of more sanctions to come. That’s already something.”
On March 2, the U.S. slapped sanctions against senior Russian officials and institutions, accusing them of poisoning Alexei Navalny, the most fierce critic of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.
Last August, the FSB tried to assassinate Navalny by putting a nerve agent in his underwear. The opposition leader spent months recovering in a German hospital. When he returned to Russia, law enforcement threw him in prison for allegedly missing a court appearance while he laid unconscious.
When they announced the latest sanctions, White House officials told Russia to release Navalny.
The U. S. sanctions target seven senior Russian officials including Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov, Federal Security Service Chief Aleksandr Bortnikov and Federal Penitentiary Service director Aleksander Kalashnikov.
Their American property has been blocked, as have all their businesses anywhere in the world. American citizens are banned from financially interacting with them.
The U. S. worked with the European Union. Brussels’ sanctions target practically the same people. The EU imposed travel bans and froze their assets. The United Kingdom also joined in with visa bans and asset freezes.
But sanctioning individuals is not the end of it.
Both the EU and the U.K. also froze the assets of Russia’s State Scientific Research Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology.
The U. S. penalties are even broader. They hit 13 Russian companies as well as the FSB and the institutes producing biological and chemical agents.
In the new sanction package, the State Department expanded on the existing Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act sanctions that had been imposed after Russia poisoned ex-spy Sergey Skripal in the U.K. in 2018.
Oleksandr Kraiev, an expert with the Ukrainian Prism nonprofit analytical center, says sanctions against research institutions are a strong response to the Russian use of nerve agents against political opponents.
“It is important to note that Russia is technically lagging behind the Western world despite creating an image that it does not rely on imported technologies,” Kraiev said. “Blocking technological cooperation with the U.S. is a significant step.”
“This is a signal not only for American companies but to the entire world that Russian science in the field of chemical development should not be cooperated with,” Kraiev said.
Obama-like sanctions?
Still, after the sanctions came into force on March 2, some political experts criticized Biden for way too soft a punch.
One reason is that there were no new sanctions against the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline Russia built to send gas to Germany, bypassing Ukraine, though which Russia used to send gas to Europe for decades. The U.S. believes this would increase Europe’s energy dependence on Russia.
The most recent sanctions against Nord Stream 2 were approved by the U. S. Congress in December as part of a major defense spending bill.
The Nord Stream 2 pipeline under construction by vessel Pioneering Spirit on Feb. 25, 2019. The $11 billion pipeline, which goes under the Baltic Sea to double the amount of natural gas transported from Russia to Europe to 110 billion cubic meters, has been under construction since 2015. For now, while it is still under construction, much of Russian gas goes to Europe through Ukraine’s transit system. (Axel Schmidt/Nord Stream 2)
Timothy Ash, a London-based emerging markets strategist, called the latest sanctions a “total joke.”
“The Biden administration sends a poor signal to Moscow from the start that it is not willing to bear the cost of countering Russian aggression,” he said in an emailed comment and added:
“The West has to learn that we have to be prepared to accept there is a price for countering Russian aggression.”
Ash said that economically, the sanctions caused little, if any damage. “Markets will view this with relief,” he said. The ruble strengthened on the news about the sanctions.
“These new sanctions will have hardly any economic impact,” agreed Anders Aslund, a Swedish economist and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
“But more sanctions on oligarchs and finance are likely to come and they will have more impact,” he told the Kyiv Post.
In late January, Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation emailed Washington’s top officials, calling on them to include 35 oligarchs and Putin associates in the sanctions list.
The Biden administration did not acquiesce. Aslund believes this will happen, but later.
“In order to sanction oligarchs, more time to check their finances is required, to avoid a repetition of the debacle with Oleg Deripaska, whose Rusal turned out to be too big to sanction,”
Aslund said of the Russian oligarch close to Putin whom the U.S. sanctioned in 2018.
The Trump administration lifted sanctions against three of his major companies a year later.
“More is likely to come,” the economist said.
More to come
The Biden administration announced that this was only the first step and more sanctions are coming.
Kraiev says that Ukraine should not be offended by the fact that the U.S. did not extend the sanctions against Nord Stream 2. According to him, there are reasons to believe that the next set of sanctions will hit the Russian pipeline.
“The U. S. has not yet imposed new sanctions against Nord Stream 2, because they are waiting for elections in Germany. Clearly, Germany is the only influential ally of the U.S. standing for Nord Stream 2. And we understand why,” Kraiev said of Germany, which would benefit from the 90%-completed pipeline economically.
Germany’s September 2021 elections are when the new round of sanctions can come into play. “If the opponents of Nord Stream win, it is likely that the sanctions will not even be needed.
And the Americans always have this ace up their sleeve,” Kraiev said.
Aslund believes more actions against the pipeline are likely.
“The Biden administration opposes Nord Stream 2, but my understanding is that they want to talk to the Germans before they impose more sanctions. There is time because with current equipment it would take the Russians more than a year to complete Nord Stream 2,” he said.
“I don’t think that Nord Stream 2 will be completed,” Aslund added.
The Biden administration also faced criticism for not sanctioning Russia’s sovereign debt, and deciding against punishing the Saudi Arabian crown prince for ordering the 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
This is just the beginning, the experts told the Kyiv Post.
“The Biden administration has promised a review of its sanctions policy on Russia, not to soften it but to make it more effective. That takes some time,” said Aslund.
What deserves the greatest attention is that the U.S, the EU, and the U.K. aligned in a transnational effort to show Russia that they are ready to strike against, Freudenstein believes.
“The most important fact about the new sanctions is that the EU and US enacted them together,” he said.
“This is not the end. As the Kremlin becomes more aggressive abroad (and more totalitarian at home) new sanctions, this time including oligarchs, are a question of time.”
