President Joe Biden asked Congress this week for stronger authorities to seize the assets of sanctioned Russian oligarchs and investigate and prosecute cases of sanctions evasion. The request was sent April 28 alongside a proposal for an additional $33 billion Ukraine-related aid package, including about $20 billion in additional military aid.
A bill that would authorize the administration to confiscate any property valued at more than $5 million from a Russian oligarch who has already been sanctioned for involvement in the Ukraine invasion passed the House 417-8.
The State Department has moved “very effectively and very efficiently” to approve exports of military equipment to Ukraine since the invasion by Russia, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said. Blinken said the agency has been able to authorize some license applications in days that previously took several weeks. “This is moving quickly,” he said during an April 26 hearing in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “We have cut through a lot of red tape.”
A key U.S. national security official who oversees certain U.S. sanctions actions is planning to take an extended leave of absence from the White House, The Washington Post reported April 26. Daleep Singh, a deputy national security adviser who has helped to lead the administration's sanctions response to Russia, will be away from the role due to family reasons, the report said. The White House is reportedly still determining how to fill Singh’s role. A White House spokesperson didn’t comment.
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The U.S. is facing a “real challenge” trying to meet growing EU demand for oil but is hopeful it can eventually help replace the bloc’s reliance on Russian energy imports, said Melanie Nakagawa, a National Security Council official. Nakagawa, speaking during an April 26 event hosted by the Center for Strategic & International Studies, said the U.S. is prioritizing efforts to create more U.S. energy export infrastructure so suppliers can ship more gas to the EU.
The U.K. amended its general license permitting certain activity with sanctioned Russian banks to include Sberbank CIB (UK), the British subsidiary of Sberbank, it said April 22. The license allows Sberbank CIB (UK) or any entity owned or controlled by the bank and incorporated in the U.K. to pay expenses for their "base needs," routine holding and maintenance expenses, and reasonable professional fees for the provision of legal services. The amended license took effect March 1 and will expire April 3, 2023.
The EU in a series of five notices announced the alignment of certain non-EU European countries with the bloc's recent sanctions moves on Russian and Belarus. North Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Ukraine and Georgia agreed to also impose the humanitarian exceptions the EU had implemented for its sectoral sanctions for the provision of goods in Ukraine and Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
The EU added new names to its Russian and North Korean sanctions regimes. Under the EU's sanctions regime relating to the Russian annexation of Crimea, the European Council April 21 added businessmen Serhiy Vitaliyovich Kurchenko and Yevgeniy Viktorovich Prigozhin to its list of individuals subject to a travel ban and asset freeze. Kurchenko took control of various metallurgical, chemical and energy plants in the separatist-held areas of Crimea. Prigozhin founded and serves as the unofficial leader of the Russian-based mercenary entity the Wagner Group, the council said.
Although EU export controls and sanctions on Russia don’t necessarily apply to Chinese-based subsidiaries of EU companies, European businesses should keep in mind that they can’t use their Chinese business to circumvent the restrictions, law firm CMS said in an April 21alert. Chinese subsidies are “incorporated under Chinese law” and “not, in principle, bound by the measures,” but their EU parent companies can’t use them to evade any “obligations that apply to the EU parent company,” the firm said. This includes “delegating to them decisions which run counter to the sanctions, or by approving such decisions by the Chinese subsidiary.”