Russia’s wealthy oligarchs and political elites flaunt a level of in-your-face affluence across the world. This week, their wealth and connections to Russian President Vladimir Putin made some of them targets of President Joe Biden’s sanctions in response to the Kremlin’s ongoing military invasion of Ukraine.
But if the Biden administration really wants to hurt Russian oligarchs enough to rein in Putin’s actions in Ukraine, it needs to hit them much harder – and hit a lot more of them, some U.S. officials and kleptocracy experts told USA TODAY.
By any measure, the new rounds of U.S. financial blockages issued this week go far beyond what has been done in the past to pressure Putin into curbing his rogue behavior, White House officials said. The sweeping actions would cause extreme hardship for some of Russia’s largest financial institutions and a small handful of Russian oligarchs and kleptocrats that Biden said use them as their own “glorified piggy bank.”
— Josh Meyer
Tens of thousands of Ukrainians have crossed into neighboring countries to the west in search of safety as Russia pounded their capital and other cities with airstrikes for a second day.
Those arriving were mostly women, children and the elderly after Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Thursday banned men of military age from leaving the country.
A woman from the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, who arrived in Przemsyl, Poland, broke down in tears describing how men were pulled off trains in Ukraine before they got to the border.
“Even if the man was traveling with his own child he couldn’t cross the border, even with a kid,” said the woman, who would only give her first name, Daria.
More than 50,000 Ukrainian refugees have fled their country in less than 48 hours, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, said Friday, as many more continued to move towards the borders. He said a majority went to Poland and Moldova.
— Associated Press
The term Russian oligarch conjures images of posh London mansions, gold-plated Bentleys and sleek superyachts in the Mediterranean, their decks draped with partiers dripping in jewels.
