An employee inspects rough diamonds at Alrosa Diamond Cutting Division in Moscow on July 3, 2019. (ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images)
ATLANTA — The Biden administration today announced expanded sanctions targeting foreign financial institutions that it says are “facilitators” of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as a broader effort to cut the knees out from under money-making exports of diamonds and seafood.
“These new sanctions authorities will make clear to foreign financial institutions that facilitating significant transactions relating to Russia’s military industrial base will expose them to sanctions risk,” White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said in a statement. “We are sending an unmistakable message: anyone supporting Russia’s unlawful war effort is at risk of losing access to the U.S. financial system.”
The US has previously targeted financial institutions with sanctions, but a senior administration official told reporters Thursday that the new executive order signed by Biden today “gives us a surgical tool that allows us to go after the financial institutions that are doing transactions that further Russia’s military [industrial] complex.”
A second senior administration official said that the US had already banned the import of “Russian non-industrial diamonds directly,” but the new order provides authorities to “ensure that if Russia ships diamonds to another country for processing, those cannot enter the United States.”
Though it’s a relatively small part of the Kremlin’s income, Russia is among the world’s leading diamond exporters and owns the world’s largest diamond mining company. The US import restrictions also include fish and seafood harvested in Russian waters or by Russian-flagged vessels, the White House said in a fact sheet about sanctions targeting “financial facilitators of Russia’s war machine.”
The executive order follows the European Union’s move on Monday to go after Russia’s diamond-related income by imposing its own sanctions on scores of officials and organizations.
The first Biden administration official told reporters the expanded executive order came in response to Russia’s “ability and willingness and desire to circumvent the sanctions and export controls we’ve already put in place.”
The official said it’s “very central to our strategy” to think about “how do we take that next step in disrupting Russia’s attempts to be able to produce the weapons systems, the industrial goods that it needs to prosecute its war?”
