The Rosneft sanctions come as the White House has sought avenues to ratchet up its maximum pressure campaign on Maduro and his regime’s backers — Russia being the largest — after an effort to replace him with opposition leader Juan Guaidó fizzled early last year.

“Today we sanctioned Russian-owned oil firm Rosneft Trading S.A., cutting off Maduro’s main lifeline to evade our sanctions on the Venezuelan oil sector,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a tweet. “Those who prop up the corrupt regime and enable its repression of the Venezuelan people will be held accountable.”

As Venezuela's leader, Maduro has overseen a dire economic and humanitarian crisis — exacerbated in part by U.S-led efforts to strain the regime’s finances — despite receiving support from Russia, Cuba and China.

Maduro, who has maintained control of the Venezuelan military, was accused by a senior administration official of “looting” his country’s vital oil assets, a significant source of funding for the cash-strapped government. U.S. special representative for Venezuela Elliot Abrams said Tuesday the country’s trading with Rosneft resulted in more than $1 billion in Venezuelan debt paid to the Russian company rather than focused on Venezuelan citizens.

Along with the U.S., dozens of other western and European countries have recognized Guaidó as interim president until new, democratic elections can be held. Trump welcomed Guaidó to the White House earlier this month and invited the opposition leader to his annual State of the Union address.

White House national security adviser Robert O’Brien previewed the possibility of Rosneft sanctions earlier this month in a briefing with State Department officials.

A senior administration official portrayed Tuesday’s sanctions as the reaction to the “growing and increasingly central role of Rosneft in the affairs of Venezuela” over the last year.

Analysts have called Rosneft one of the main global conduits for Venezuelan crude, a leak in the U.S. pressure on Maduro that the Trump administration will seek to plug with Tuesday's sanctions. As an example, a senior Trump administration official said Tuesday the U.S. discovered that Rosneft shipped 2 million barrels of Venezuelan crude oil to West Africa just last month, and planned shipments involving 55 million barrels of “crude oil liftings” over the course of the fall.

But a senior administration official said that while Tuesday’s move was a “serious global action,” the White House was confident global energy markets would remain stable. The administration said it expects the global financial sector to back away from the Rosneft subsidiary, which facilitated the illicit transactions by misrepresenting the origin of Venezuelan oil, or other ship-to-ship transfers, in light of the sanctions.

Senior administration officials contended that the Rosneft sanctions were aimed in part at putting the rest of the world on notice that the U.S. is serious about its pressure campaign on Caracas and the Trump administration’s willingness to punish those who seek to help Maduro evade U.S. sanctions.

While an official intimated Trump had not spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin about the new measures, they said he’d signed off on them and noted Trump had spoken with Putin about Moscow’s interference in Venezuelan affairs. Pompeo addressed the issue with his Russian counterpart when they met at the Munich Security Conference last weekend, the official said.

Although Maduro has maintained power one year after the U.S. first sought to remove him from office, administration officials maintained the White House had seen “increased evidence” of internal pressure on the Venezuelan leader to leave office, arguing that entities like Rosneft contributed to a sense of false confidence for the dictator.

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In a press briefing at the State Department, Abrams teased that the Rosneft sanctions were part of a new wave of actions intended to squeeze the regime.

“There will be more steps and further pressure in the coming weeks and months,” he said, predicting pressure will continue to build “steadily.”

Abrams rejected the notion that the administration’s actions on Tuesday were not expected to inflict any pain on their own but acknowledged that no one individual step “can be calculated to end the crisis.”

While he would not detail any of the forthcoming actions, a source familiar with the discussions told POLITICO earlier this month that Treasury has also considered placing sanctions on the export of Venezuela’s estimated $4 billion in gold reserves, which has proven another lucrative source of funds for the government. Cuban trade with Venezuelan could also be a target of sanctions, the official added.

Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D-Fla.), the first member of Congress born in South America, called the sanctions overdue, while urging the administration to ditch its unilateral efforts in favor of a "more comprehensive" approach to the Venezuelan crisis and grant temporary protected status to to Venezuelans in the U.S.

“It’s no secret that Maduro has been using petroleum profits to prop up his narco-authoritarian regime, and these types of sanctions have been necessary for a long time now,” she said in a statement. “It’s clear that the United States must develop a more comprehensive strategy on Venezuela that brings in our global allies to increase the effectiveness of our diplomatic and humanitarian efforts."