Ambassador James O’Brien, the sanctions coordinator at the US State Department, highlighted on Friday, 2 September the implementation of sanctions against Russia, saying they were working.
“Sanctions implementation is the crucial piece”, he stressed during a meeting with some journalists, including EUROPE, in Brussels.
Mr O’Brien felt that the sanctions were working. “Russia sells its oil at a great discount to the global price. The Russian economy has difficulty buying key inputs, particularly in energy, advanced technology and defence sectors”, he explained.
According to the ambassador, sanctions have introduced friction and uncertainty into the Russian system. “Russia is now in a situation where it has to buy from unknown suppliers at uncertain prices and has to obtain equipment that is of unknown quality. It is impossible to run a modern economy on this basis”, he explained.
Mr O’Brien, who took up his post in April, said the initial structure of the sanctions, “in a way was incredibly ingenious and much more far-reaching than the Russians expected”.
The US representative warned that the pressure would continue to increase in the coming months. “We will be doing more to intensify this pressure, especially by focusing on choke points in the Russian economy. And we’ll be doing that always with our partners”, he said.
According to the ambassador, there is still room to impose new measures and it is a matter of “anticipating how Russia will try to respond and work around the sanctions”. “We’ll build a stronger coalition and deny them some of the circumvention techniques that they may attempt”, he said.
Regarding the loopholes to be stopped, the ambassador said the US was “very focused on technology that will benefit the defence sector, so high-tech, dual-use technology. It is very hard for Russia to obtain enough of that at a price that’s predictable and through channels that are predictable. So what we’ll look at is ensuring that there is no open back door (...) to obtain that equipment”, he explained. “The same is true for funding that Russia is largely shut out of any kind of global financial investment. And we want to be sure that they can’t recreate their access to global financial networks”. He said that what the EU had done by withdrawing SWIFT from Russian banks was important.
Cognisant of the fact that Russia was trying to go through other countries to get what it needed, “especially in Central Asia, through the Caucasus”, Mr O’Brien said that these countries needed alternative economic outlets. “One of the things we are doing with our European partners is to make sure that these economies have an alternative path, rather than just helping Russia. And I think we are seeing good progress being made in this area”, he stressed. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)