US imposes sanctions on russian banks and financial officials

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the U.S. Department of the Treasury (USDT) has imposed sanctions on more than 100 entities in the russian financial sector. Among them are about 50 russian banks, participants in russia's financial infrastructure, as well as high-ranking officials of the Central Bank of the aggressor country.

Andrii Pyshnyi, the head of the National Bank of Ukraine, has announced this.

"This is one of the largest sanctions packages introduced by the U.S. to the Russian financial sector, and each of its points is the result of continuous negotiations between the Ukrainian team and the U.S. sanctions team," he noted.

The sanctions list was headed by Gazprombank, one of the few major russian creditors that has not yet been blacklisted, in order to limit the kremlin's ability to finance its military efforts.

"Based on the results of today's analysis, we can say that almost all banks from the hundred largest in terms of assets of Russian financial institutions have already been targeted and do not have access to the global financial system. We can already observe releases from individual banks on the list about the suspension of foreign exchange settlements," Pyshnyi wrote.

Foreign financial institutions that will continue to work with sanctioned banks may be subject to secondary sanctions.

Personal sanctions affected officials from the financial sector. In particular:

• Olga Polyakova, Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank of the russian federation, who, among other things, is responsible for cooperation with the FATF;
• Vladimir Chistyukhin, First Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank of the russian federation, responsible for international settlements;
• Dmitry Tulin, Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank of the russian federation, responsible for banking supervision and regulation;
• Officials of foreign subsidiaries/branches of Sberbank (New Delhi) and VTB (Shanghai) are also on the list.

Among the participants in the financial infrastructure, we can single out registrars who facilitate the circumvention of sanctions applied to the National Settlement Depository.

As the Ukrainian News agency earlier reported, the aggressor country russia has already lost hundreds of billions of dollars from sanctions, but the russians continue to earn money that allows them to continue the war against Ukraine.

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