The White House stated that the Kremlin would have to pay the high cost as soon as the Russian troops crossed the Ukrainian border. Washington warned that Biden’s administration is preparing a package of financial, economic, and military sanctions that would enter into force immediately after the invasion, though details were not specified.
Notably, the US and its allies are fully aware that tough sanctions would hurt the Western financial sector. Nevertheless, they are ready to take such risks for the sake of defusing geopolitical tensions, independent observers point out. The Western community does not tolerate the Kremlin challenging Europe’s post-Cold War borders and NATO’s military presence on the continent.
An official of the US Treasury Department said that Biden’s administration is debating various options of anti-Russian sanctions that could deal a painful blow to the Russian economy. The assessment of would-be side effects and solutions of how to curb them require well-grounded decisions in terms of the state policy, a spokesperson of the Treasury Department noted.
For the time being, the White House is engaged in the talks with first-rate US banks, negotiating the impact of anti-Russian sanctions and the ways of how to soothe their bottlenecks for the global financial system. The US authorities made it clear to the banks that they are concerned about side effects from restrictions like it happened in 2018.
