President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced he will blacklist two Russian banks and impose further sanctions on the purchase of Russian sovereign debt as punishment for Moscow deploying additional military troops to a pair of breakaway regions in Ukraine it declared independent.
The move by the president came after an announcement by the German government that it had removed its prior certification for the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline — something that had long been demanded by Republican, and many Democratic, lawmakers. The idea is to use the Russia-to-Germany pipeline as leverage against Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Collectively, the moves announced by Washington and Berlin show the two largest economies in NATO are treating Putin’s bolstering of existing Russia-aligned forces in the two separatist regions in eastern Ukraine — Donetsk and Luhansk — as the first steps of a deeper invasion of, as Biden put it Tuesday, a “big chunk” of Ukraine.
