Western nations and Japan on Tuesday punished Russia with new sanctions for ordering troops into separatist regions of eastern Ukraine and threatened to go further if Moscow launched an all-out invasion on its neighbour, according to Reuters.
The United States, the European Union, Britain, Australia, Canada and Japan announced plans to target banks and elites while Germany halted a major gas pipeline project from Russia in one of the worst security crises in Europe in decades.
Bitter about Ukraine’s long-term goal to join NATO and claiming it as historic Russian land, Russian President Vladimir Putin has amassed more than 150,000 troops near Ukraine’s borders, according to U.S. estimates, and ordered soldiers into the breakaway Donetsk and Luhansk regions to “keep the peace”.
“To put it simply Russia just announced that it is carving out a big chunk of Ukraine,” U.S. President Joe Biden said on Tuesday. “This is the beginning of a Russian invasion.”
The Ukrainian military said early on Wednesday one soldier had been killed and six wounded in 96 incidents of shelling by pro-Russian separatists in the east over the previous 24 hours. It said separatist forces used heavy artillery, mortars and Grad rocket systems.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian cancelled separate scheduled meetings with Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday as weeks of frantic diplomacy failed to end the crisis.
Putin said he was always open to finding diplomatic solutions but that “the interests of Russia and the security of our citizens are unconditional for us.”
Lavrov brushed off the threat of sanctions. “Our European, American, British colleagues will not stop and will not calm down until they have exhausted all their possibilities for the so-called punishment of Russia,” he said.
U.S. sanctions target Russian elites and two state-owned banks, excluding them from the U.S. banking system, banning them from trading with Americans, and freezing their U.S. assets. They also seek to deny the Russian government access to Western financing.
The U.S. sanctions applied to VEB bank and Russia’s military bank, Promsvyazbank, which does defence deals. Russia’s two largest commercial lenders, Sberbank and VTB, would face American sanctions if Moscow proceeded with its invasion of Ukraine, a U.S. official said.
Biden said that while more sanctions were being prepared in the event of a full-scale invasion, it was critical to ensure such measures did not hurt Americans in the form of steeper energy costs.
Britain announced sanctions on three billionaires with close links to Putin, and five smaller lenders including Promsvyazbank.
The European Union has agreed to blacklist banks involved in financing separatists in eastern Ukraine and to cut the Russian government out of its debt markets.