President Joe Biden announced additional sanctions that “will impose severe costs on the Russian economy” following its invasion of Ukraine.
“Putin is the aggressor. Putin chose this war and now he and his country will bear the consequences,” Biden said from the White House Thursday.
Watch President Biden’s press conference:
The new sanctions will target Russian banks, oligarchs and high-tech sectors
Earlier, a U.S. Defense official said Russia has “every intention” of overthrowing the Ukrainian government with President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the neighboring country on Thursday.
“What we are seeing is initial phases of a large-scale invasion,” a senior Pentagon official told reporters. “They’re making a move on Kyiv.”
“They have every intention of decapitating the Ukraine government,” the official said.
The official said the first Russian assault involved more than 100 short-range ballistic missiles, but also medium-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and surface-to-air missiles. The missiles were targeted at military sites — airfields, barracks and warehouses.
The United States has “seen indications” that Ukrainian troops “are resisting and fighting back,” the official said.
Putin launched the invasion early Thursday in the biggest European onslaught since the end of World War II, attacking Ukrainian forces in the disputed eastern region and launching missiles on several key cities, including the capital, Kyiv.
Putin called it a “special military operation” aimed at the “demilitarization and denazification” of its southern neighbor, once a Soviet republic but an independent country since 1991.
Some information came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, and Reuters.
BOGOTA COLOMBIA). Thursday, February 24, 2022 (RPTV NEWS AGENCY). With the warning of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the attack on Ukraine began, stating that the offensive was necessary to protect civilians in the east of that country, warning that “whoever interferes will face consequences.”
Ukrainian authorities reported bombs and explosions in 10 regions of the country, especially in the capital Kiev, also, at least 7 people have died and another 19 are missing.
On the Ukrainian roads that connect that country with Eastern Europe, traffic jams have formed of people who want to leave the main cities for fear of instability and the possible advance of Russian troops. Neighboring countries such as Hungary, Romania and the Czech Republic are already preparing to receive thousands of people.
On the other hand, President Volodymyr Zelensky authorized civilians to prepare themselves with firearms in order to respond to Vladimir Putin’s warnings.
Finally, the massive protests and demonstrations of 2013 and 2014 in Ukraine, which managed to remove President Viktor Yanukovych, an ally of Vladimir Putin, from power and replace him with a pro-European government, caused a division between the two countries, which has triggered the current conflict that began with the Russian annexation of the Ukrainian province of Crimea in 2014.
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U.S. President Joe Biden said a crucial European gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2, will not go forward if Russia invades Ukraine, as high-level diplomatic efforts took place Monday to try to prevent an invasion, with Germany’s leader traveling to Washington and France’s president to Moscow.
Biden told reporters at the White House on Monday after a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, “the notion that Nord Stream 2 would go forward” in the event of an invasion by Russian tanks or troops is “just not going to happen.”
“I promise you we will be able to do that,” Biden said when asked how he could make that happen.
Scholz did not directly say whether Germany would cancel the pipeline project but said, “We will take all the necessary steps, and all will be done together” with the United States and other allies.
He said, “We have prepared a reaction that will help us to react swiftly if needed” in the event of a Russian invasion. He said Germany would not “spell out everything in public.”
FILE – The logo of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project is seen on a large diameter pipe at the Chelyabinsk Pipe Rolling Plant owned by ChelPipe Group in Chelyabinsk, Russia, Feb. 26, 2020.
The Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, running under the Baltic Sea, is designed to bring Russian natural gas to Germany. The pipeline was recently completed but is not yet operational.
The U.S., among others, has viewed putting the brakes on the pipeline as part of the deterrence of a Russian attack on Ukraine, eliminating potential Russian revenue from the pipeline.
Addressing reporters Monday, Biden also urged Americans in Ukraine to leave the country, saying, “It would be wise” for them to do so.
The U.S. State Department has already said nonessential employees in Ukraine could leave the country along with family members.
At the outset of their discussions, Scholz, who took power in Berlin in December, and Biden emphasized the close relationship between their two countries. But they have taken different approaches in assisting Ukraine, with the United States sending weapons to the Kyiv government, and Germany sending 5,000 military helmets Ukraine requested, while adhering to its long-held position of not shipping arms into a conflict zone.
Biden, nonetheless, said the two countries are “working in lockstep” to “further deter Russian aggression in Europe.”
“We are closest allies and working intensely together. And this is necessary for doing the steps that we have to do, for instance, fighting against Russian aggression against Ukraine,” Scholz said.
FILE – Russia’s President Vladimir Putin speaks with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron during a video conference call at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence outside Moscow, Russia, June 26, 2020.
Meanwhile in Moscow, French President Emmanuel Macron held talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday, trying to curb the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Putin said after the talks that Russia would do its best “to find compromises” in the crisis with the West over Ukraine and said, “As far as we are concerned, we will do everything to find compromises that suit everyone.”
He said there would be “no winners” if war broke out on the European continent.
At the start of their meeting, Macron told Putin, “This discussion can make a start in the direction in which we need to go, which is towards a de-escalation” to “avoid a war” and “build elements of confidence, stability and visibility for everyone.”
The Kremlin had said ahead of the talks that it did not expect any immediate resolution of its stalemate with the West.
Macron said following the talks that he and Putin would speak again in a couple of days. The French president heads to Kyiv for talks with Ukrainian leaders on Tuesday.
Moscow has deployed more than 100,000 troops along Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia and in its ally, Belarus, with the West fearing that Putin could at any time order an invasion of Moscow’s one-time Soviet republic.
France, the United States and their NATO allies have rejected Moscow’s demand that they rule out possible Ukraine membership in the Western military alliance formed after World War II.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby speaks during a media briefing at the Pentagon, Jan. 4, 2022, in Washington.
Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said Monday Putin continued to add to his troop numbers along the borders with Ukraine over the weekend.
“Sizable forces continue to be added to the forces Mr. Putin has arrayed,” Kirby told reporters. “With each passing day, he gives himself a lot more options from a military perspective.”
The United States has warned that a Russian invasion “could happen at any time,” according to U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan.
BidenWhite House national security adviser Jake Sullivan speaks during the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, Oct. 26, 2021.
“We believe that the Russians have put in place the capabilities to mount a significant military operation into Ukraine, and we have been working hard to prepare a response,” Sullivan told NBC’s “Meet the Press” show on Sunday.
In a separate interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Sullivan said, “Any day, Russia could take action against Ukraine, or it could be a couple weeks,” with U.S. intelligence officials assessing that Moscow has 70% of its strike force in place for an attack.
Biden has ruled out dispatching the U.S. military to fight in Ukraine, but now has deployed 3,000 U.S. troops to Romania and Poland on NATO’s eastern edge and sent $500 million in military assistance to the Kyiv government.
Carla Babb contributed to this report. Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, and Reuters.
A bipartisan effort in the U.S. Senate has come together to produce what the chairman of the body’s Foreign Relations Committee has dubbed “the mother of all sanctions” to be levied against Russia in the event of a new invasion of Ukraine.
According to committee chairman Robert Menendez, senators are on the cusp of agreeing to a package of measures meant to make the financial cost of aggression in Ukraine extremely high for high-ranking government officials and ordinary Russians.
The bill being considered, Menendez said in an interview Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” show, involves “massive sanctions against the most significant Russian banks, crippling to their economy, meaningful in terms of consequences to the average Russian in their accounts and pensions.”
FILE – Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., speaks on Capitol Hill, Jan. 27, 2021.
In addition, Menendez said he expects the Senate to approve additional “lethal assistance to Ukraine” in the form of weapons, as well as economic sanctions on key sectors of the Russian economy, and a bar on Russia’s ability to sell its sovereign debt in international markets.
The Senate is considering taking action against Russia, because Moscow currently has well over 100,000 troops positioned along Ukraine’s northern, eastern and southern borders. In 2014, Russia invaded Crimea, a region of Ukraine, and took control of it. At the same time, it began providing support to a pro-Russian insurgency in Ukraine’s Donbass region, which has perpetuated a long, low-intensity conflict in that region for the past several years.
Bipartisan resolve
Menendez was joined by Senator James Risch, the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in a show of bipartisan resolve. Risch said he is not convinced that Russia has decided it actually will invade Ukraine, and said that is why telegraphing the economic price Moscow will pay in advance is important.
FILE – Sen. James Risch, R-ID, speaks in Washington, April 10, 2019.
“Well, I don’t think that decision has been made yet,” Risch said. “There’s a lot of us that believe that if (Russian President Vladimir) Putin sees weakness, if he sees bumbling, ineptitude, if he sees indecision, he will take advantage of that. I don’t think he’s made a decision to do that yet.
“What (Senator Menendez) and I and our coalition of bipartisan senators are attempting to do is to project the resolve that we have as Americans to see that he doesn’t do that. To provide the strength, project the strength and convince him that this would be a very, very bad idea and it’s going to be extremely painful.”
Russia well-positioned to resist
Not all experts agree that the sanctions the U.S. is contemplating will be as punishing to Russia and to the Putin regime as lawmakers think.
Kristine Berzina, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, told VOA that Russia has been living with some degree of sanctions, as well as the threat of more sanctions, for most of the past decade and has taken steps to create an economic buffer.
“Russia has tremendous currency reserves set up so that it can make good on its sovereign debt, and it can suffer through some economic hardships,” she said.
To the extent that new sanctions cause short-term pain while Moscow figures out how best to work around them, she said that it’s during that early period under sanctions when Putin would benefit most from calls for patriotic sacrifice from the Russian people.
“The short term really is also the moment in which Putin will have the most support from his people, because then the likelihood is that an attack would be portrayed as some kind of defensive measure against the ‘encirclement’ by NATO and the refusal to meet what they would consider reasonable demands to turn back history,” Berzina told VOA.
Battle at U.N.
The preparation of sanctions took place as representatives from the U.S. and Russia clashed harshly in a meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Monday morning. The meeting was convened at the request of the U.S. in order to discuss what the U.S. and its NATO allies have described as threatening behavior by Russia toward Ukraine.
Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vasily Nebenzya attends a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on the situation between Russia and Ukraine, at the United Nations Headquarters in Manhattan, New York City, Jan. 31, 2022.
Russian Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya, in remarks to the Security Council, accused the United States of “whipping up hysteria” about Russia’s intentions toward Ukraine. In the same remarks, he suggested that the U.S., with its increasingly strident warnings about Russia’s intentions, is actually “provoking escalation.”
Russia was not alone in suggesting that the U.S. has overstated the danger of a Russian invasion. Even senior officials in Ukraine have asked representatives of the U.S. to tone down their warnings.
Over the weekend, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged Western governments to avoid causing panic within Ukraine, saying that the potential “destabilization of the situation” inside Ukraine is currently the greatest threat facing his country.
In a statement released after the Security Council meeting ended, U.S. President Joe Biden said, “If Russia is sincere about addressing our respective security concerns through dialogue, the United States and our Allies and partners will continue to engage in good faith. If instead Russia chooses to walk away from diplomacy and attack Ukraine, Russia will bear the responsibility, and it will face swift and severe consequences.”
Russia says it is watching “with great concern” a U.S. move to put 8,500 troops on alert for possible deployment to Eastern Europe, amid fears a Russian invasion of Ukraine could be imminent. As VOA’s senior diplomatic correspondent Cindy Saine reports, diplomatic efforts continue as the U.S. and NATO boost their military deterrence.
In the months since Russia began massing troops on the border of Ukraine, the Biden administration has, on multiple occasions, warned that any further aggression by Moscow toward its neighbor would be met with unprecedented levels of sanctions. Now, the White House appears to be dropping some specific hints about what those sanctions might look like.
According to multiple confirmed media reports, the administration has begun laying the groundwork for a ban on the sale of high-technology products containing U.S.-made components or software to Russia.
The plan echoes steps the Trump administration took against the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei in 2020, barring vendors from selling the company semiconductors it needed to produce mobile telephone handsets. The ban had devastating consequences for Huawei’s business. Once the world leader in smartphone sales, it has fallen to 10th overall since the ban was put in place.
FILE – A man uses his smartphone as he stands near a billboard for Chinese technology firm Huawei at the PT Expo in Beijing, Oct. 31, 2019.
The extent to which the administration intends to cut off Russian supplies of high-tech gear is unclear, and that’s probably intentional, experts said.
“As with any sort of major event, or crisis, or potential invasion, government leaders want options … from strongest to weakest and everything in the middle, in terms of actions that can be taken,” Kevin Wolf, a former assistant secretary of Commerce for export administration in the department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, told VOA.
Wolf, now a partner with the law firm Akin Gump in Washington, said that the administration is unlikely to signal exactly what action it will take unless Russia forces its hand by trying to take over more of Ukraine’s territory.
In 2014, in an earlier invasion, Russia took control of Crimea, a region of Ukraine, and continues to support local militias that control parts of the country’s Donbass region.
Extraterritorial reach
The U.S. appears to be considering the application of a new doctrine, the foreign direct product rule, to Russia. First put forward under the Trump administration, the rule would make it illegal under U.S. law for any entity in the world to sell high-technology equipment to Russia if that equipment was made or tested using U.S. technology.
Theoretically, that could apply to virtually any product in the world that contains semiconductors, given the prevalence of U.S. technology and software involved in the devices’ manufacturing process.
The rule relies on the implicit threat that companies that rely on U.S. technology or software to produce their products — even if the physical components of the products themselves originate outside the U.S. — could find themselves cut off from crucial licenses or equipment if they refuse to honor the U.S. export ban.
The extreme reach of the rule, into the business dealings of non-U.S. firms, makes it politically fraught, according to Jim Lewis, senior vice president and director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
However, speaking with VOA, Lewis said, “Using force against Ukraine really justifies it.”
‘No more iPhones for Russia’
The U.S. has a wide range of options when it comes to blocking the transfer of technology to Russia, both in terms of the entities within Russia that the sanctions affect and the companies outside Russia that would be subject to them. (The U.S. already has export controls in place that target Russia’s defense sector, so anything the Biden administration applies would be in addition to those existing sanctions.)
FILE – A customer waits to buy Apple’s new iPhone X before its launch outside Central Universal Department Store in Moscow, Russia, Nov. 3, 2017.
At the more targeted end of the spectrum, the administration could identify specific companies, making it illegal to sell U.S. technology to them. More broadly, the U.S. could impose sectorwide restrictions, barring the export of technology to, for example, the Russian civil aviation industry.
At the far end of the spectrum would be a flat-out ban on the sale of all U.S.-related technology to Russia.
“If they go for the maximum approach, that means no more iPhones for Russia,” said Lewis, of CSIS.
Pushing Moscow toward China?
If the U.S. does move forward with extensive technological sanctions against Russia, it will be difficult for Moscow to fill the gap with domestic production, said Jeffrey Edmonds, a senior analyst at the security think tank CNA.
“Russia has always been fairly weak when it comes to things like microchips, microelectronics and electronics in general,” Edmonds told VOA. “That’s coupled with the fact that Russia has a very weak entrepreneurial system, in that most of the technology companies in that whole sector are really run by government-sponsored organizations that are highly inefficient and subject to high levels of corruption.”
The result could be to push Moscow toward China, which has already been working to create a domestic manufacturing base that, in the future, might be able to provide Russia with homegrown equipment that would render U.S. sanctions ineffective.
In an email exchange with VOA, research analysts Megan Hogan and Abigail Dahlman, at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, pointed out that United Nations data indicate that Russia already imports some 68% of its consumer IT products from China.
“In the short term, the application of the (foreign direct product) rule will provide the Chinese government with further evidence of Western powers, particularly the U.S., meddling in Eastern affairs, validating the Chinese government’s … anti-foreign sanctions measures and further straining U.S.-China relations,” Hogan and Dahlman wrote. “Chinese tech companies will likely be forced to choose between access to the U.S. market and access to the Chinese market, with penalties associated with either decision.”
They continued, “In the long term, the U.S. risks expediting China’s development of its own domestic semiconductor industry. China’s largest chip manufacturer, SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation), is currently years behind its competitors in terms of its manufacturing technology and capacity. While China is already making moves to improve its domestic semiconductor manufacturing (as is the U.S.), U.S. technology sanctions on Russia are likely to expedite the process at the cost of the American semiconductor industry.”
