How the U.S. and Europe Are Targeting Putin With Sanctions

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine was scathing in a statement posted on Facebook on Friday.

“This morning, we are defending our state alone,” he said. “Like yesterday, the world’s most powerful forces are watching from afar. Did yesterday’s sanctions convince Russia? We hear in our sky and see on our earth this was not enough.”

Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, which carried out the painstaking technical work behind the sanctions, said on Friday that the penalties would hit the Russian economy’s ability to function by starving it of important technology and access to finance.

Its most ambitious elements were also the most technical: The European Union will ban the export of aircraft and spare parts that are necessary for the maintenance of Russian fleets. Ms. von der Leyen said that three-quarters of the aircraft in the Russian aviation fleet were made in the European Union, the United States or Canada, and that the new restrictions effectively meant many planes would soon be grounded.

The bloc will also ban the export of specialized oil-refining technology as well as semiconductors, and it will penalize more banks — although it will stop short of targeting VTB, Russia’s second-largest bank, which has already been hit with American and British sanctions, according to a draft describing the penalties seen by The New York Times.

And the European Union will target Russian elites by cutting diplomatic and service passport holders’ access to E.U. visas, and by limiting the ability of Russian nationals to make deposits of more than 100,000 euros (about $113,000) into European bank accounts.

The way Europe’s sanctions against Russia are shaping up highlights that some E.U. countries, most prominent among them Germany and Italy, prefer an incremental approach to penalizing Mr. Putin, in part to protect a fragile post-pandemic economic recovery in Europe.

On the other side are countries neighboring Russia and Ukraine, like Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as the European Union’s Nordic members and the Netherlands. They would prefer not to break up the sanctions into smaller packages but rather to hit Mr. Putin with overwhelming economic measures that truly sting.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/us/politics/sanctions-on-russia-putin.html