US to announce new sanction package on Russia on Wednesday
By Phil Mattingly, Kaitlan Collins and Sam Fossum, CNN
(CNN) -- The US will announce new sanctions on Russia Wednesday in coordination with Group of 7 nations and the European Union, according to an administration official.
The official said the sweeping package "will impose significant costs on Russia and send it further down the road of economic, financial, and technological isolation."
The new sanctions package will ban all new investment in Russia, increase sanctions on financial institutions and state-owned enterprises in Russia, and sanction Russian government officials and their family members.
The new sanctions package will mark the latest escalation in efforts by the US and its allies to impose costs on Russia for its invasion and, over time, cut off critical economic sectors the country utilizes to wage the ongoing war. They also follow new revelations of further atrocities committed by Russian forces in northern Ukraine, with the images of the atrocities committed in Bucha serving as an accelerator to ongoing discussions between the US and its European allies to ramp up the economic costs, officials said.
"These measures will degrade key instruments of Russian state power, impose acute and immediate economic harm on Russia, and hold accountable the Russian kleptocracy that funds and supports Putin's war," the official said. "These measures will be taken in lockstep with our allies and partners, demonstrating our resolve and unity in imposing unprecedented costs on Russia for its war against Ukraine."
The official added, "We had already concluded that Russia committed war crimes in Ukraine, and the information from Bucha appears to show further evidence of war crimes. And as the President said, we will work with the world to ensure there is full accountability for these crimes. One of those tools is sanctions -- and we have been working intensively with our European allies on further sanctions."
The expected sanctions come after the US Treasury announced it will no longer allow Russia to pay down its debt using dollars stockpiled at American banks. While Washington had imposed sanctions on the Russian Central Bank freezing their foreign currency at US banks, the Treasury Department had previously allowed Russia to use those reserves to repay its debt.
It's a move that officials say will substantially raise the risk of default and undercut urgent efforts by the central bank to stanch the economic bleeding that immediately arrested the Russian economy in the wake of the Western response to the invasion.
Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine started at the end of February, the US and its allies have sanctioned hundreds of Russian elites and lawmakers, restricted the country's access to Western technology important to its defense and technology sectors, frozen roughly half of Russia's foreign reserves and cut off specific Russian banks from the SWIFT banking network, among other steps. The US has also banned the import of Russian oil, natural gas and other energy products.
While the severity and swiftness of the Western sanctions against Russia have been unprecedented, key carve outs remain as US officials continue to monitor US and European supply chains and try to limit the impact of sanctions on Western economies that are grappling with record-high inflation levels.
CNN reported late last week that Russia faces a deep recession and high inflation as sanctions push the country toward having an increasingly closed economy, a shift which US officials believe the Kremlin will struggle to make since it has long relied on the sale of raw materials to buy sophisticated equipment and consumer goods.
This story has been updated with additional information.
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