Today News: sanctions

Showing posts with label sanctions. Show all posts

Navalny Urges Systematic Sanctions Against Russian Oligarchs

Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny on Tuesday called for systematic punitive measures against Russian oligarchs supporting Russia's President Vladimir Putin and his military operation in Ukraine.

In a lengthy social media post, he said that Western sanctions -- by the United States, European Union or the United Kingdom -- have only targeted 46 of the Forbes list of Russia's 200 richest people.

"That doesn't sound very much like an all-out war on Putin's oligarchs to me," Navalny said.

According to him, the head of Russian gas giant Gazprom, Alexei Miller, was still not on the EU sanctions list.

Navalny said that famed Russian oligarch -- and former Chelsea football club owner -- Roman Abramovich had so far escaped US sanctions, despite his companies "supplying metal to the Russian defence ministry".

"We can't expect a split among Putin's elite on the issue of war if, despite a lot of chatter, we still don't use the stick against them, while allowing them to keep all their carrots," he said.

"I call on all voters and legislators in the EU, UK, US and Canada to put pressure on the executive branch and force them to stop engaging in demagoguery and urgently get down to massive personal sanctions against Putin's thieves."

He also suggested that the European Union, United States and United Kingdom ban anyone supporting the Russian military offensive in Ukraine from their soil "for 20 years".

Navalny is serving a nine-year prison sentence in a penal colony near the Russian town of Vladimir on embezzlement charges that he and his allies say are politically motivated.

But he has continued to pass on messages to his lawyers.

Navalny, 46, rose to prominence as an anti-corruption blogger and, before his imprisonment, mobilised anti-government protests across Russia.

In 2020, he barely survived a poisoning attack that he has blamed on the Russian authorities, but in which the Kremlin has denied any involvement.

He was arrested last year on his return from treatment in Germany, sparking widespread condemnation abroad.

His anti-corruption organisation has drafted a list of more than 6,000 officials it accuses of backing the Russian operation in neighbouring Ukraine.

Source https://www.globalcourant.com/navalny-urges-systematic-sanctions-against-russian-oligarchs/?feed_id=11833&_unique_id=62fc16f662445

Sanctions-Hit Russia Starts Stripping Aircraft for Parts – Reuters

Russia’s flagship airline Aeroflot has started stripping its passenger aircraft for parts after Western sanctions over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine it off from foreign equipment and servicing it heavily relies on, Reuters reported Tuesday, citing four unnamed aviation industry sources.

Russia's 2030 aviation industry strategy envisions the “partial dismantling” of a portion of foreign-made aircraft to keep two-thirds of the country's fleet airworthy until 2025.

At least one almost brand new Airbus A350 and the Russian-built Sukhoi Superjet 100 are grounded and being disassembled, Reuters cited one source as saying.

Equipment from some of Aeroflot’s Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s is also being taken to keep other planes airworthy.

These are the first detailed examples of what aviation experts predict to be the cannibalization of Russia-based planes as the impact of Western sanctions becomes more apparent.

International flight bans imposed on Russian airlines in retaliation to the Ukraine war also means that grounded jets can be stripped for parts, Reuters cited a second source as saying.

At least 50 out of Aeroflot’s 360 airliners have not taken off since July, according to Reuters’ calculations based on flight data.

Aeroflot has seen a 22% fall in traffic this April-June compared with the same time last year.

The risk of secondary sanctions is expected to discourage companies from Asian and Middle Eastern countries that have not imposed sanctions on Russia from supplying the needed aircraft equipment.

“Each single part has its own [unique] number and if the documents will have a Russian airline as the final buyer, then no one would agree to supply, neither China nor Dubai,” Reuters quoted one source as saying.

Source https://www.globalcourant.com/sanctions-hit-russia-starts-stripping-aircraft-for-parts-reuters/?feed_id=8571&_unique_id=62f2307179783

Gazprom Says Sanctions Make Gas Turbine Delivery ‘Impossible’

Russian energy giant Gazprom said Wednesday that delivery of a turbine needed to keep gas flowing to Europe via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline was "impossible" due to sanctions on Moscow.

"Sanctions regimes in Canada, in the European Union and in Britain, as well as the inconsistencies in the current situation concerning the contractual obligations of [turbine maker] Siemens make the delivery impossible," Gazprom said in a statement.

The statement risks further increasing concern in European countries who suspect Moscow is looking for an excuse to delay the turbine's return to Russia and further reduce its gas deliveries.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said Russian President Vladimir Putin was trying to "play games with us" but said there was "no chance" he could split the Western alliance.

Earlier on Wednesday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz accused Russia of blocking the delivery of the key turbine to throttle gas supplies to Europe, as he raised the possibility of keeping nuclear plants going.

The continent's biggest economy has been scrambling for energy sources to fill a gap left by a reduction in gas supplies from Moscow.

Baerbock acknowledged it had been "a mistake to be so dependent on Russian cheap gas", prompting a drastic change in German energy policy to phase it out.

The delayed return of the turbine from Canada, where the unit was being serviced, was behind an initial reduction in gas deliveries via the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline in June, according to Gazprom.

Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly on Wednesday admitted that returning the turbine to Russia was "a difficult decision," also condemning Putin's attempt to "sow division."

Supplies via the energy link were further reduced to around 20% of capacity in late July, after Gazprom halted the operation of one of the last two operating turbines due to the "technical condition of the engine."

Source https://www.globalcourant.com/gazprom-says-sanctions-make-gas-turbine-delivery-impossible/?feed_id=6322&_unique_id=62eb3c8b9da33

U.S. Sanctions Putin 'Girlfriend,' More Oligarchs for 'Complicity' in Ukraine War

The United States blacklisted Russian President Vladimir Putin's purported girlfriend and the tycoon owner of the second-largest estate in London on Tuesday in the latest round of sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine.

Also hit with U.S. business bans were several other oligarchs believed to be close to Putin, four officials Russia has named to administer occupied territories in Ukraine, and around two dozen high technology institutes and companies, including key state-backed electronics entities.

The U.S. Treasury announced sanctions on Putin associate and billionaire Andrey Grigoryevich Guryev, who owns the Witanhurst estate, the second-largest estate in London after Buckingham Palace.

Guryev is the founder and former deputy chairman of PhosAgro, a major supplier to global fertilizer markets.

He and his son were hit with financial sanctions, which ban U.S. businesses — including banks with U.S. branches — from transactions with them, and freeze their assets under U.S. jurisdictions.

The Treasury also blacklisted Guryev's Caribbean-based 81-meter (267 feet) yacht Alfa Nero, which puts it at risk of seizure.

However, the Treasury said Alfa Nero "has reportedly shut off its location tracking hardware in order to avoid seizure."

The Treasury also imposed sanctions on Alina Kabaeva, a former Olympic gymnast widely described as Putin's girlfriend, and Natalya Popova, the wife of Kirill Dmitriev, the manager of the Russian government's massive sovereign wealth fund.

The Treasury said Popova works for the technology firm Innopraktika, which is run by one of Putin's daughters.

"As innocent people suffer from Russia's illegal war of aggression, Putin's allies have enriched themselves and funded opulent lifestyles," Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement.

"The Treasury Department will use every tool at our disposal to make sure that Russian elites and the Kremlin's enablers are held accountable for their complicity in a war that has cost countless lives," Yellen said.

Viktor Filippovich Rashnikov, one of Russia's largest taxpayers, and two subsidiaries of his MMK, which is among the world's largest steel producers, also were hit with sanctions.

In a joint action, the State Department imposed sanctions, including visa restrictions, on oligarchs "running massive revenue-generating companies," including Dmitry Aleksandrovich Pumpyanskiy, Andrey Igorevich Melnichenko and Alexander Anatolevich Ponomarenko.

In addition, nearly 900 Russian officials were placed on a U.S. visa ban list, as were 31 unnamed non-Russian officials who have supported Russia's occupation of Crimea, the State Department said.

"Today, the United States is taking additional actions to ensure that the Kremlin and its enablers feel the compounding effects of our response to the Kremlin's unconscionable war of aggression," Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.

Source https://www.globalcourant.com/u-s-sanctions-putin-girlfriend-more-oligarchs-for-complicity-in-ukraine-war/?feed_id=5846&_unique_id=62e9d6aecfd15

Sanctions ‘Cripple’ Russian Economy, Study Says

The Russian economy has been deeply damaged by sanctions and the exit of international business since the country invaded Ukraine, according to a new report by Yale University business experts and economists.

Even though Moscow has been able to pull in billions of dollars from continued energy sales at elevated prices, largely unpublished data shows that much of its domestic economic activity has stalled since the Feb. 24 invasion, according to the report released in late July.

"The findings of our comprehensive economic analysis of Russia are powerful and indisputable: Not only have sanctions and the business retreat worked, they have thoroughly crippled the Russian economy at every level," said the report from the Yale School of Management.

"Russian domestic production has come to a complete standstill with no capacity to replace lost businesses, products and talent," the 118-page report said.

The report was produced by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, president of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, and other members of the institute, a mix of economists and business management experts.

With Moscow having halted or pared the release of official economic statistics, including crucial trade figures, Sonnenfeld's group tapped into data held by companies, banks, consultants, Russian trading partners and others to build a picture of Russian economic performance.

They also said they obtained unreleased data from experts on the Russian economy, and data in other languages which supported their conclusions.

Even if Russia is able to earn more foreign exchange on gas and oil exports, that has not offset the impact of Western sanctions.

And, they argue, the country's dependence on Europe to buy 83% of its energy exports leaves it under a greater medium-term threat.

"Russia is far more dependent on Europe than Europe is on Russia," they said.

Car industry crashes

Russia largely survived Western economic sanctions after Moscow's 2014 seizure of the Ukraine region of Crimea.

President Vladimir Putin pushed a program of replacing some imports with domestic products and built up a cushion of financial reserves.

But the country's industry remained heavily driven by foreign capital investment and the import of higher-tech inputs that Russia had not mastered, like semiconductors.

The barrage of deeper sanctions after the invasion took aim at both of those vulnerabilities, the report said.

Some 1,000 foreign companies halted their activities in the country, potentially impacting up to 5 million jobs, according to the report.

Industrial output plunged, and Russian retail sales and consumer spending have fallen at an annual rate of 15-20%.

Imports have plunged across the board, the report said; crucial imports from China fell by more than half.

A key example of Russian problems, according to the report, is the automobile sector.

Car sales went from 100,000 a month to 27,000 a month, and output has stalled due to a lack of parts and machinery.

Without access to imported components, Russian producers are putting out cars without airbags or modern anti-lock brakes, and only with manual transmissions.

Threat to gas revenues

The report challenged the belief that the Russian economy was surviving thanks to the tens of billions of dollars the country reaps each month from oil and gas exports.

Last week the IMF said the Russian economy, though contracting, was doing better than expected due to its energy and commodity export income.

The Yale report said data indicates energy revenues have been falling for the last three months.

If Western Europe succeeds in cutting itself off from Russian natural gas, Moscow faces an "unsolvable" situation with a lack of a market for its output, according to the report.

"Any decrease in oil and gas revenues or oil and gas export volumes would immediately put a strain on the Kremlin's budget," it said.

Source https://www.globalcourant.com/sanctions-cripple-russian-economy-study-says/?feed_id=5440&_unique_id=62e8b4749de1b

EU to Cut Russian Gas Use as Missiles Strike Ukraine

The European Union agreed to reduce gas consumption to break its dependence on Russia on Tuesday, as missile strikes on Ukraine's Black Sea coast cast doubt on a grain export deal.

The effort to help Germany wean itself off Russian gas for the winter came as Turkey announced a meeting in Russia next week between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.

Erdogan wants Turkey — on good terms with both Moscow and Kyiv — at the center of diplomatic efforts to halt the five-month war, just as the EU took another big step to cut ties to Moscow.

The EU gas use cut, approved by energy ministers in Brussels, was hailed as an effective response to Russia's manipulation of its energy wealth as an economic weapon.

The plan nominally commits EU countries to reduce their gas use by 15% during the winter, although exceptions were carved out for some countries and Hungary rejected the deal as "useless."

"We have made a huge step towards securing gas supplies for our citizens and economies for the upcoming winter," said Czech industry minister Jozef Sikela, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency.

"I know the decision was not easy, but I think at the end, everybody understands that this sacrifice is necessary," he added.

Hungary was the only country to oppose the plan, which passed on a majority vote, further isolating Budapest as the only member state reluctant to go further against Russia.

"This is an unjustifiable, useless, unenforceable and harmful proposal that completely ignores national interests," said Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto.

The deal "serves purely communication purposes, and aims to save the credibility of some Western European politicians," he added.

German 'mistake'

Germany, the EU's economic powerhouse, is hugely dependent on Russian gas. Berlin takes a major share of the 40% of EU gas imports that came from Russia last year.

"It is true that Germany, with its dependence on Russian gas, has made a strategic mistake but our government is working... to correct this," German Economy Minister Robert Habeck said.

The plan asks member states to voluntarily reduce gas use by 15% —based on a five-year average for the months in question — starting next month and over the subsequent winter through March.

The target will be adapted to the situation of each country, taking into account their level of stocks and whether or not they have pipelines to share gas.

Exceptions were given for island states like Ireland, Cyprus and Malta and to Spain or Portugal, which have limited links to the interconnected gas supply grid.

Baltic countries will be exempted if their electricity connections with Russia's grid were to be cut.

In the final proposal, EU member countries also rewrote an earlier European Commission plan to give Brussels — rather than the member states — the power to impose gas use cuts in an emergency.

The regulation now foresees the possibility to trigger a "Union alert" that would make the target mandatory, but the decision would lie with member states, a statement said.

The EU deal landed a day after Gazprom said it is cutting daily gas deliveries intended for Europe to about 20% of capacity from Wednesday.

Gazprom claimed technical reasons for choking off supply, but EU Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson dismissed this claim.

"This is a politically motivated step and we have to be ready for that and exactly for that reason the pre-emptive reduction of our gas demand is a wise strategy," she said.

The extent of Russia's split with the West over Ukraine was also underlined by Moscow's announcement that it would quit the International Space Station after 2024.

Until now space exploration was one of the few areas where cooperation between Russia, the United States and its allies had not been wrecked by tensions over Ukraine and elsewhere.

The decision to leave the ISS program "has been made", Roscosmos chief Yury Borisov told Putin.

'Difficult' winter

Meanwhile, fighting continued in Ukraine. Kyiv said Russian forces launched multiple missile strikes at targets on the Black Sea coast near the southern port city of Odesa and in Mykolaiv.

The attacks come days after Russian strikes hit Odesa called into question a breakthrough deal to resume exports of grain from Ukraine, that have been disrupted by Moscow's invasion.

Rescuers were working on the ground near Odesa where "residential buildings" near the coast were hit in the strikes, Ukraine's southern military command said on Facebook.

In the east, Kramatorsk's mayor Oleksandr Goncharenko said he was worried about how tens of thousands of mostly elderly residents would cope in the coming months without any gas to keep them warm.

"This winter will be very difficult," he said.

He said that Ukrainian forces would have to push the Russians back at least 20 kilometers (12 miles) to be able to make repairs to broken gas pipes.

He called for more long-range weapons from Western allies to help repel the enemy.

Source https://www.globalcourant.com/eu-to-cut-russian-gas-use-as-missiles-strike-ukraine/?feed_id=2614&_unique_id=62e0a552113c9

Parallel Imports Cut Russian Keyboard Supplies – Kommersant

Laptops and keyboards without a Russian-language layout are increasingly reaching Russia under a government scheme that maintains imports despite Western sanctions and an exodus of international businesses over the war in Ukraine, the Kommersant business daily reported Monday.

Russia’s “parallel import” scheme allows the supply of keyboards and laptops originally intended for foreign markets without approval from trademark owners.

The Industry and Trade Ministry said a Russian layout can be engraved on keyboards within the country without affecting the overall price of the product.

Demand has doubled for laser engraving services to change keyboard layouts into Cyrillic script, with keyboards and laptops coming mostly from Turkey and the United Arab Emirates this year, experts told Kommersant.

But the practice involves unpacking the devices, which customers would then be less likely to buy, and sometimes completely removing the keyboard, which could cancel warranties, according to Kommersant.

Russia has imported 2 million keyboards at a value of 4 billion rubles ($69 million) and 1.4 million laptops at a value of 90 billion rubles ($1.5 billion) in January-June 2022, according to the retailer M.Video-Eldorado.

Experts forecast keyboards without a Russian language layout to reach 10% by the end of 2022.

Government tenders have also been affected by Russia’s keyboard parallel import mechanism.

“There are problems with supplying automated workstations [with Russian keyboard layouts] to departments as part of contracts that had already been signed,” an unnamed government source was quoted as saying.

“The terms of the tenders prohibit contractors from delivering workstations without a keyboard or with an English keyboard layout,” they added.

Source https://www.globalcourant.com/parallel-imports-cut-russian-keyboard-supplies-kommersant/?feed_id=1678&_unique_id=62de1cf8a51ac