The US government under Joe Biden will impose a fresh set of sanctions on more than 500 targets on Friday in response to the death of opposition figure Alexey Navalny and on the eve of Russia’s two-year war in Ukraine.
According to a US Treasury official, the sanctions mark the latest move by the administration to punish Russia amid heightened tensions between the two countries.
US President Joe Biden teased the sanctions on Thursday, February 22 saying that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “responsible” for Navalny’s death. The comments came shortly after he met in San Francisco with Navalny’s widow and daughter.
Biden repeatedly condemned Putin and called him “a crazy SOB” during a fundraiser in San Francisco on Wednesday, according to the pool reporters travelling with the US president.
“We have a crazy SOB that guy, Putin, others. And we always have to be worried about a nuclear conflict. But the existential threat to humanity is climate,” Biden told those gathered at the fundraiser.
The Kremlin, in response, said Biden’s comments were a “huge disgrace” for the United States.
US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the new measures would be a “substantial package” that covers a wide range of elements linked to the Russian defence industrial base and sources of revenue for the Russian economy that power the country’s “war machine.”
Sullivan described the package as “another turn of the crank” after withering Western sanctions on Moscow since the start of the Ukraine war. While those sanctions have hampered Russia’s economy, they haven’t deterred Putin from proceeding with the invasion.
US officials had been working on a new sanctions package on Russia ahead of Navalny’s death and supplemented them in the wake of the opposition leader’s death, according to a senior US official, adding that US officials coordinated with European partners on the new package.
