US President Joe Biden announced Thursday night that he and his G7 counterparts agreed to move forward on “devastating packages of sanctions” and other economic measures “to hold Russia to account” following its invasion of Ukraine earlier in the day.
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Biden told reporters the US is adding four more Russian banks to the two that Washington has already sanctioned, in addition to a list of names of “Russian elites and their family members … People who personally gain from the Kremlin’s policies should also share its pain,” he said.
Vladimir Putin was not among those being sanctioned, and the president ducked a question from a reporter, asking him why.
The US and its Allies, Biden said, “will limit Russia’s ability to do business in dollars, euros, pounds, and yen” and will restrict state-owned enterprises from raising funds.”
Sanctions will also be imposed on non-specified goods being exported to Russia from the US, he said.
“We have purposely designed these sanctions to maximize the long-term impact on Russia and to minimize the impact on the United States and our Allies,” he said.
Biden warned gas and oil companies not to exploit the situation to raise gas prices at the pumps, and said the US will release “additional barrels of oil” from its domestic supply as needed.
But when asked about what the US is doing specifically to help Ukraine, Biden said American is sending “humanitarian relief to relieve their suffering.”
The option of barring Russia from using the SWIFT international banking system is still on the table, he said, but “right now that’s not a position Europe wishes to take,” and maintained that sanctions being imposed by the US, NATO and its allies “exceed SWIFT.”
Biden warned that if not stopped, Putin was not likely to end his aggression with Ukraine. “He has much larger ambitions than Ukraine. He wants to, in fact, re-establish the former Soviet Union. That’s what this is about,” the president said.
He added, “If we don’t move against him now with these significant sanctions, [Putin] will be emboldened.”
A senior Defense Department official told W7VOA‘s Steve Herman, “At the direction of the president, Secretary of Defense [Lloyd] Austin has ordered the deployment to Europe of approximately 7,000 additional service members.”
Earlier in the day, a senior Defense Department official told reporters that at least two lines of Russian troops were headed directly for Ukraine’s capital city, Kiev, from the directions of Belarus and Crimea. Ukrainian soldiers were seen in Kiev late Thursday afternoon burning paper documents next to the intelligence building, to prevent them from falling into Russian hands.
