US slaps sanctions on 120 more Russian, Belarusian companies

WASHINGTON/ROME/WARSAW/ANKARA/TBILISI/TOKYO/BERLIN/BAKU/BEIJING, Apr 4 (PRIME) -- The U.S. Department of Commerce has expanded the anti-Russian and anti-Belarusian sanctions by putting 120 more companies from the two countries on its blacklist, the authority said in a statement late on April 1.

The list includes Russia’s Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute, subsidiaries of Tactical Missiles Corporation, state defense companies Svyaz and Salut, research association Mars, as well as Belarusian tractor and military truck producer MZKT, state-controlled entities from Gomel, Belarusian State Security Committee’s elite group Alpha, and others.

SANCTION TALKS, BOOMERANG IMPACT

The E.U. has no plans to slap sanctions on the Russian energy industry, European Commissioner for Economy Paolo Gentiloni told reporters on April 2.

“We are working on further packages of sanctions. To be clear, they do not include the energy sector as of now. We are working on an attempt to restrict the opportunities for bypassing the sanctions right now,” he said.

But Piotr Muller, press secretary of the Polish government, said that Poland had suggested a new list of the anti-Russian sanctions to the European Commission, and wants the union to implement previous promises to stop financial flows to and from Russia.

The second point of the proposals is termination of supplies of the Russian oil, gas and coal to the E.U., or at least outlining prospects of when it could happen clearly. The third point is complete confiscation of Russian oligarchs’ property in the E.U. instead of its current freeze, Muller said.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said on his Twitter page that the current Western sanctions are a flop as the ruble is returning to where it was before the special operation in Ukraine, which means that the sanctions failed to produce the expected impact.

Turkey will not join the anti-Russian sanctions, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said in an interview to TRT Haber television channel broadcast on April 1.

“We have already stated our position that we will not join the sanctions. We used the right that the Montreux Convention gives us, and military vessels are not allowed to the (Bosporus and Dardanelles) straits. Warships are kept away from the military operation, this is our positions, and all the parties understand it,” he said.

Europe’s dependency on Russian natural gas will remain relevant for the next 10 years, he added.

Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili said that his country would not impose economic sanctions on Russia because it would contradict national interests.

Japanese Economy, Trade, and Industry Minister Koichi Hagiuda said that the only way for the world to act is to toughen sanctions on Russia, but they will obviously have a negative impact on the other economies, including Japan. The world powers should start thinking about softening  anti-Russian sanctions only when peace in the region becomes obvious.

German Finance Minister Christian Lindner also said that the situation in Ukraine would lead to the wealth of Germans falling. The country will have to pay more for the energy sources, and it will be unable to prevent the wealth of citizens from falling, and the support measures for troubled companies will be only temporary, he said.

Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio said that the sanctions hurt the energy spheres of all European countries. Italy wants to break free from the energy dependency on Russia, and Azerbaijan is one of the priority partners in that, he said.

Cecilia Rose, representative of U.S. President Joe Biden’s council of economic advisors, said in an interview to CNBC that the White House was concerned with the possibility of drastic worsening of food supplies in several regions of the world due to the situation in Ukraine. Russia and Ukraine were the “bread basket” for many countries of the world as they cultivated wheat, soy, and other crops, she said.

China is no side of the Russian–Ukrainian conflict, and Beijing does not want its trade relations with all countries, including Russia, hurt by the sanctions, Wang Lutong, director-general of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s European Affairs Department, said in a news briefing on April 2.

“We will not do anything on purpose to bypass the sanctions that U.S. and the E.U. imposed on Russia. You know our position, we are against the sanctions … China is not a side of the conflict in Ukraine, and we think that our normal trade cooperation with other countries should not be hurt. Even Europe is doing business with Russia as usual, you did not suspend trade with Russia completely, so our usual trade relations with Moscow should not be hurt,” he said.

Employment and the standard of living in China depends on the trade with other countries and with Russia as well, he said.

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