(Washington) Under pressure from all sides, US President Joe Biden announced on Friday that he was going to sanction Vladimir Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in person, an extremely rare and highly symbolic act.
Posted at 5:02 p.m.
Updated at 6:34 p.m.
The impact of these sanctions is still unclear, but White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki indicated that Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov would, among other things, be banned from entering American territory.
She later announced that the United States would also sanction the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a Russian sovereign fund aimed at attracting investment into the Russian economy.
Joe Biden had already promised in recent days to deal a terrible blow to Russia’s economy and to relegate Vladimir Putin to the rank of “pariah” on the international scene in response to the invasion he is leading in Ukraine.
But when the fighting reached the capital Kiev, several NATO member countries expressed the wish to go further in the reprisals.
In the morning, the American president, who is trying to lead a united Western response to Russia’s maneuvers, took part in a meeting with members of the organization from the “Situation Room”, the ultra-secure room of the Maison- White.
In the process, Brussels and London announced sanctions against Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov, Washington following in their footsteps a few hours later.
These sanctions are a sign of the “powerlessness” of the West immediately castigated Russian diplomacy, alerting to the fact that relations with the West were close to the “point of no return”.
Swift
In addition to calling for punishing Vladimir Putin, many voices are being raised to exclude Russia from the Swift interbank network, an essential cog in global finance. It is “an option” according to Joe Biden, but which the president has so far refused to take, stressing that certain European countries are opposed to it for the moment.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, who met Joe Biden earlier this week, said he underlined Friday with his counterpart Antony Blinken “the need to use all the influence of the United States on certain hesitant European countries in order to exclude Russia from Swift”.
But the American president appears in fact to have his hands more and more tied on the international scene.
As when, by his own admission, the man who had made his Asia-Pacific strategy one of the markers of his foreign policy, indicated that he still had “things to solve” with India on the Russian-Ukrainian crisis. India abstained on Friday evening against a UN resolution deploring Russian aggression in Ukraine.
” Do more ”
Joe Biden, who is already suffering from an anemic popularity rating nationally, will also have to justify his position in this war to Americans during his major general policy speech to Congress, scheduled for Tuesday evening.
If the Americans, tired of the endless conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, are rather reluctant for the United States to play a major role in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, many elected officials are calling on Mr. Biden to raise his voice.
“We can and must do more,” urged influential Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, head of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and close to the president.
Several conservative elected officials have also insinuated that the chaotic withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan, orchestrated by Joe Biden, had acted as an “invitation” to dictators around the world to act.
“The only language that Putin understands is firmness,” said conservative tenor Lindsey Graham, calling for “prosecuting” the Russian leader whom he described as a “war criminal”.
In the circles closest to Donald Trump, some even took the opportunity to once again express doubts about the ability of Joe Biden, president almost octogenarian, to govern.