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President Joe Biden on Tuesday is poised to issue harsh new sanctions targeted at Russia, as the administration has started calling the country’s actions in eastern Ukraine the “beginning of an invasion.”
Details on the sanctions were imminent. White House principal deputy national security adviser Jonathan Finer hinted earlier on Tuesday in a CNN interview that they would be issued in response to the “egregious step that [Russia] took yesterday away from diplomacy and down the further path toward war.”
The new actions will come after Russian President Vladimir Putin over the weekend recognized the Russian-backed breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, both located in the disputed Donbas area, as “independent” people’s republics and ordered troops into those areas. President Joe Biden quickly issued an executive order on Monday prohibiting new investment, trade and financing by U.S. persons to, from or in those regions, according to a senior administration official.
Putin’s official order described the Russian troop movements as working to “maintain peace,” according to The Associated Press, but U.S. officials and other allies have decried the move as a violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said himself that it violated his country’s territorial integrity and “all responsibility for the consequences of these decisions rests with Russia’s political leadership.” A statement issued on Monday by Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Russia’s decision “yet another example of President Putin’s flagrant disrespect for international law and norms.”
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In a speech released by the Kremlin on Monday, Putin said it was “necessary to take a long overdue decision” to recognize the two Donbas regions as independent and called Ukraine an “integral part of our own history, culture, spiritual space,” according to a Kremlin translation of his remarks. The Russian leader criticized actions by the U.S. and NATO and invoked terms like “genocide” to explain his decision – which was predicted by Blinken during a speech at the U.N. Security Council on Thursday.
“Russia has every right to take retaliatory measures to ensure its own security,” Putin said. “That is exactly what we will do.”
Tuesday’s sanctions will be part of a flurry of moves made by the U.S. and its partners in response to the Russian invasion into Ukraine. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Tuesday that his country would halt the process of certifying the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline that runs from Russia, according to the AP – an action that Biden himself has frequently threatened. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced his own country’s sanctions on Tuesday, targeted against Russian banks and billionaires, the BBC reported.
Meanwhile, the world awaits a possible further invasion by Russia. The State Department said on Monday that its personnel in Lviv would leave Ukraine and spend the night in Poland “for security reasons.” The workers, however, “will regularly return to continue their diplomatic work in Ukraine and provide emergency consular services.”
“Finding it difficult to imagine Putin pauses for long, content with a bigger foothold in eastern Ukraine,” Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said in a tweet on Tuesday. “His ‘speech’ Monday strongly suggests his ambitions are to reintegrate Ukraine into Russia, one way or another.”