The US is to keep its planned sanctions against Russia completely secret, so Moscow doesn’t have the opportunity to mitigate them in advance, a senior American official said on Sunday.
Speaking to CBS on Sunday, US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland explained that Washington was working on a set of measures that would be imposed were Russia to invade Ukraine, but would not be letting the Kremlin know what they were beforehand.
“With regard to this package of sanctions … deterrence is best when there’s a little bit of strategic ambiguity around exactly what we are going to do,” Nuland explained. “So, we’ve said financial measures, we’ve said export controls, we’ve said new sanctions on Russian elites. But if we put them on the table now, then Russia will be able to start mitigating, and that doesn’t make any sense to us.”
Nuland’s statement came as a group of US lawmakers from both the Democratic and Republican parties, led by Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ), reported that they were close to agreeing on a set of sanctions that could be implemented immediately after any Russian invasion.
Russia repelled a wave of attempted Ukrainian drones strikes on oil refineries and energy infrastructure…
Antony Blinken traveled to China this week to warn Beijing about sanctions for supplying military…
The Ukraine conflict is Washington’s doing and the US is deliberately trying to prolong the…
The US-supplied Army Tactical Missile Systems, known as ATACMS, will allow Ukrainian forces to target…
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has revealed he once got up-close and personal with a “strategic…
The long-range ATACMS missiles that the US has supplied to Ukraine are “extremely dangerous weapons,”…