Riddle Me This: If All Roads Lead to Putin, Why is the Boot of US Sanctions on the Windpipes of Putin’s Pals?
If you thought the Trump-Putin narrative was put out of our misery by Robert Mueller’s drooling performance back in May, you’d be wrong. The Democrats try to resuscitate it daily: one of Nancy Pelosi’s mantras is “all roads lead to Putin.”
Adam Schiff and Gerald Nadler brought up Russia repeatedly in their drone strike of an impeachment presentation before the Senate. And by drone strike, I don’t mean something explosive, like blowing up Soleimani: I mean they droned on and on and on.
Schiff demonstrated just how little he and his ilk actually know about Russia and Putin. Schiff drew laughs when he said Trump had made a religious man out of Putin:
“‘Thank God,’ Putin said, ‘Thank God nobody is accusing us anymore of interfering in U.S. elections, now they’re accusing Ukraine,’” Schiff said.
One may question the sincerity of Putin’s public religious displays, but one cannot dispute that he has repeatedly and consistently expressed religious sentiments, utilized religious symbolism, and has attempted to increase the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in Russian life. All long before Donald Trump was even a candidate. But apparently Schiff and the idiots who laughed with him (rather than at him) have a mental image of Putin as a godless commie. But we’re supposed to take their alarums about Trump and Putin seriously.
This continuing attempt to bring the Trump-is-Putin’s-puppet narrative back to life is utterly futile. They would have better luck giving CPR to King Tut’s mummy.
It is futile because it is completely untethered from reality. Trump administration policy towards Russia has been as harsh, or harsher, than Obama administration policy (even after the farcical “Reset”). Nordstream II is one example. Perhaps the best example is the suffocating sanctions that have been imposed on some of Putin’s inner circle and closest friends.
My friend Ivan Tkachev, a journalist at RBC, has been writing about the sanctions issue. This recent piece looks at the implications of the Finnish court decision against one of Putin’s closest friends, his judo buddy Boris Rotenberg.
If you aren’t familiar with it, RBC is one of the last–if not the last–major independent news outlets in Russia. It is definitely not a Kremlin organ, or a monkey to an organ grinding Putin. Putin tolerates it, as many canny authoritarians do, because he wants information that comes from outside the echo chamber. RBC is supposedly at the top of Putin’s reading pile every morning.
As an illustration of Ivan’s independence–and courage–he put idiotic western journalists (who swallowed the Sechin/Rosneft/Putin line) to shame in his coverage of the farcical Rosneft “privatization.” (I made a modest contribution to Ivan’s reporting, but I did it from the safety of Houston–not Moscow.)
So Ivan is not one to carry the Kremlin’s water, or that of oligarchs like Rotenberg, by exaggerating or distorting the severity of the Trump Treasury Department’s sanctions. Read the article, and you see that this sanctions regime places a heavy boot on the windpipe of people like Rotenberg, Deripaska, and Viktor Vekselberg:
2. It turns out that Russian oligarchs blacklisted under the US sanctions regime are cut off from the entire Western financial system, not just the American one. There are many examples of this ‘toxic’ extraterritorial effect of US secondary sanctions. For instance, Vekselberg’s and Oleg Deripaska’s frozen bank accounts in Cyprus; frozen dividends on Bank of Cyprus shares owned by Vekselberg; forced sales of private jets by the Rotenberg brothers and Deripaska. If we take into account that Chinese banks (despite the mythologised Russian-Chinese friendship) are extremely cautious about working with blacklisted Russians (as representatives of Russia’s Central Bank admitted in late 2018), it turns out that Russian oligarchs blacklisted under US sanctions are isolated from virtually the entire global financial system.
3. Moreover, the risk of secondary sanctions does not depend on the currency in which payments to or from SDNs are made; in the context of primary sanctions US dollar payments are a decisive factor, but secondary sanctions can be imposed regardless of the currency. In the case of Rotenberg, attempts were made to transfer payments in euros but the banks refused to execute the transactions.
The gravamen of the article is that banks around the world–even Chinese ones–are petrified by the scourge of secondary sanctions. If you want to do business in the US, or in dollars with anyone, you will not deal with anyone on the sanctions list in dollars–or in dinars or bolivars or . . . in bubblegum cards or wampum.
Indeed, although the sanctions formally restrict only “significant” transactions with those under ban, what counts as “significant” is in the eye of the US Treasury. The risks to a bank are so great that it’s wiser to engage in no transaction at all–even something as trivial as processing payment of a Rotenberg’s electric or trash bills.
Just as one may question the sincerity of Putin’s religiosity, one may question whether this administration’s sanctions on prominent Russians close to Putin reflect Trump’s sincere beliefs. But one cannot question that these sanctions exist, and are extremely punishing to the Putinites that they target.
But people like Pelosi and Schiff don’t even question: they pretend that they don’t exist. And this demonstrates that there is no doubt whatsoever about their insincerity, and fundamental dishonesty.