U.S. sanctions on Russian oligarchs miss richest of rich

The term Russian oligarch conjures images of posh London mansions, gold-plated Bentleys and sleek superyachts in the Mediterranean, their decks draped with partiers dripping in jewels. Mr. Biden said Thursday the new U.S. sanctions would nonetheless cripple Russia’s financial system and stymie its economic growth by targeting Russia’s biggest banks, which the Treasury Department said holds nearly 80% of all the country’s banking assets. Daniel Fried, a former U.S. official under both Democratic and Republican administrations who helped craft U.S. sanctions against Moscow in the wake of Putin’s 2014 invasion of the Crimean Peninsula, said he was surprised Mr. Abramovich and Mr. Usmanov weren’t on the sanctions list announced Thursday, given their long ties to Putin and visible assets in the West. “The oligarch class is an important pillar of the Putin regime and is heavily exposed because their assets are held in the West – in villas in the South of France, condos in Trump properties, and in sports teams.” Maria Shagina, a sanctions expert at the Helsinki-based Finnish Institute of International Affairs, said European countries are seeking to insulate their own economic interests from the effects of sanctions, whether that’s natural gas piped to Germany, diamonds imported from Siberian mines or Italian luxury cars and designer handbags sold in Moscow or St. Petersburg. “Sanctions enforcement is inherently a cat-and-mouse game,” said Marhsall Billingslea, who helped set sanctions policy for the Trump administration, “and they’ve had eight years, ever since Crimea, to set up alternative mechanisms to keep hard currency flowing to the regime.” Edward Fishman, a former State Department official during the Obama administration, said the move to sanction Putin sends a strong signal of support to the Ukrainians who are under fire.