US lawmakers move to expand White House authority over Russia sanctions

WASHINGTON – US lawmakers moved Tuesday to give President Joe Biden’s administration greater authority to impose sanctions on Russia for its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine earlier this year.

Republican Senator Pat Toomey and Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen have laid out a framework supporting the administration’s efforts, along with G-7 leaders, to limit the price of Russian oil exports.

“We are effectively depriving the Russian government of profits that they are probably using to finance this war,” Toomey told reporters at a news conference on Tuesday. “We are going to show whether or not the free world has the resolve to stop a brutal autocrat from redrawing international borders because he thinks he can.”

The United States and G-7 allies are expected to agree on a price cap for Russian oil exports in December, when a European Union oil embargo also comes into effect.

“If you want to put a global price cap on Russian oil, you have to make sure it’s applied evenly. And to do that, we think you need to back it up with secondary sanctions. On the contrary, on the contrary, Russia will exploit loopholes. And there are other countries, like China, that are already drastically increasing their imports of Russian oil,” Van Hollen told reporters on Tuesday.

“If the price cap works, as the administration and we hope, then the sanctions will never kick in, because you have a global price difference. These sanctions will only kick in if the administration fails to hit that price.” uniform,” Van Hollen said.

The framework calls for monitoring Russian oil purchases and would allow Biden to impose sanctions on countries and financial institutions that seek to profit from a cap on Russian oil.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the United States has imposed harsh sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russian oligarchs, and the Russian banking sector.

The United States and its allies have also cut off Russia’s access to Western banking institutions and blocked many of Putin’s relatives and friends from traveling abroad.

The US Treasury Department “has sanctioned hundreds of Russian individuals and entities, and this includes most of the country’s largest financial institutions, key nodes and the military, Russia’s industrial supply chains, and oligarchs and henchmen who helped perpetuate Putin’s war,” Elizabeth Rosenberg, assistant secretary for terrorist financing and financial crimes at Treasury, told lawmakers on Tuesday.

“The United States has been joined by more than 30 countries collectively representing more than half of the global economy in imposing sanctions, the largest sanctions regime in modern history,” Rosenberg added.

Rosenberg told lawmakers that the threat of a price cap was already having an impact on the global market, changing the behavior of countries that have not imposed it.

“They can’t use the existence of the price cap any less to take advantage of lower prices from Russia. And in fact, we’re already seeing that Asian buyers have used the price cap to take advantage of lower prices, lower rate prices of Russian energy. That is this policy that is already working,” he said.

The Toomey-Van Hollen framework will become the first major bipartisan Russia sanctions legislation, introduced in Congress since February.

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