The American government announced Thursday a series of sanctions targeting around fifty Russian banking establishments in order to limit “access to the international financial system” and reduce financing of the Russian war effort in Ukraine.
These sanctions, which target in particular the financial arm of the gas giant Gazprom, Gazprombank, also concern around forty financial registration offices and 15 managers of Russian financial establishments.
“This decision will make it more difficult for the Kremlin to avoid American sanctions to finance and equip its army,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement.
“We will continue to act against any funding channel that Russia could use to support its illegal and unprovoked war in Ukraine,” she added.
“In September, President (Joe) Biden announced increased aid and additional actions to support Ukraine in its resistance to Russian aggression. Today the United States is imposing significant sanctions against more than 50 financial institutions to degrade its ability to continue its brutal war against the Ukrainian people,” insisted the national security adviser to the American president, Jake Sullivan, in a press release. separated.
The sanctions concern Gazprombank, but also all of its foreign subsidiaries, established in Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Cyprus and South Africa.
They also target more than fifty small or medium-sized banking establishments that Moscow is suspected of using to channel its payments for equipment and technologies that Russia acquires.
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The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has also issued an alert to foreign establishments that would be tempted to join the Russian Financial Message Transfer System (SPFS), set up after Russian financial establishments were banned to use the international SWIFT system.
OFAC warns that “any foreign financial institution that has joined or wishes to join SPFS could be designated as operating or having operated within the Russian financial system” and therefore likely to be targeted by sanctions.
Among those affected by the sanctions, they were extended to several members of the Russian Central Bank as well as Russian managers of financial establishments based in Shanghai and New Delhi.
The sanctions result in the freezing of assets held directly or indirectly by the targeted entities or persons in the United States, as well as the prohibition for any American company or citizen from trading with the targeted persons or companies, at the risk of being in turn sanctioned.
The people targeted are also prohibited from entering American territory.
Although they are not necessarily linked, these new sanctions come at a time when Russia is suspected of having used a strategic missile, a first in world history, to strike the Ukrainian city of Dnipro (center).
According to Washington, however, it would be an “experimental medium-range ballistic missile”.
