Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo plans next week to put Russia and its intelligence services on notice: the US is monitoring their efforts to circumvent US sanctions and is cracking down.
“As we look forward, one of the centerpieces of our strategy will be to counter attempts to evade our sanctions,” Adeyemo will say in remarks Tuesday at the Council on Foreign Relations, according to excerpts of his speech obtained by CNN. “We know Russia is actively seeking ways to circumvent these sanctions. … In fact, one of the ways we know our sanctions are working is that Russia has tasked its intelligence services – the FSB and GRU – to find ways to get around them.”
Adeyemo, the department’s No. 2, will deliver the remarks ahead of the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, reflecting on the US-led efforts to destabilize the Russian economy and push crushing sanctions to undermine President Vladimir Putin’s ability to wage war.
“A big piece of this is information and intelligence sharing, which is something we started doing even before Russia’s invasion,” Adeyemo said in an interview with CNN. “So, mapping out an evasion network that allows us to look across jurisdictions to share information, and then take action is a big piece of this.”
His remarks come as the Kremlin increasingly turns to its clandestine services to avoid Western sanctions.
Since Russia launched its bloody war against Ukraine, the US has imposed thousands of sanctions against Russian politicians, oligarchs and companies, cut off the Russian central bank from its dollar-denominated reserves as well as the global financial messaging system, undermined Russia’s defense-industrial base and imposed a price cap on Russian oil and petroleum products.
“The thing that we are doing with our colleagues at Commerce is we’re slowing Russia…
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