Obama's sanctions against Russia are going to take a while to be felt. Obama, Putin push Ukraine strategies

President Barack Obama’s incremental strategy on the Ukraine crisis marched forward Monday — but so did Russian President Vladimir Putin, without appearing to notice.

Through targeting the bank accounts of 11 Russian and Ukrainian government and business leaders, the administration hopes the pressure on the so-called “cronies” — as administration officials repeatedly called them Monday — will get through to Putin himself.


But though the sanctions are the most aggressive any American president has taken against Russia since the end of the Cold War, they’re going to take a while to be felt, and even then, it’s an open question of how much the people targeted by them will care. White House officials haven’t laid out what happens if Putin doesn’t back down — and the options aren’t great.

( PHOTOS: 20 great quotes on Putin and Obama)

“Going forward, we can calibrate our response based on whether Russia chooses to escalate or to de-escalate the situation,” Obama said Monday at the White House, announcing the latest actions.

The sanctions — which already go further than President George W. Bush went when Putin invaded Georgia in 2008 — are the latest phase in a process that started with warnings, continued with a cancellation of preparations for the May G-8 summit in Sochi and the creation of a legal sanctions framework, and made a few stops along the way at the White House podium and U.N. Security Council.

So far, sanctions are the main lever administration officials have discussed publicly. The most obvious place to go next would be to expand the number of people targeted by the sanctions, ratcheting up to the 21 hit by the European Union sanctions passed Monday, or beyond.

The new sanctions executive order, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said Monday afternoon, “provides us with broad authority and scope to impose costs on Russian Government officials, individuals or entities operating in the arms or materiel sector in the Russian Federation, and those that provide support to senior Russian government officials.”

( Also on POLITICO: Obama announces new sanctions)

But the effectiveness of that approach hinges on Putin listening, and on them actually trying to talk to him. Depending on how many bank accounts the targeted officials have hidden away and how long they think they’ll be able to ride out sanctions, they may not feel rushed to pick up the phone anytime soon. Russian oligarchs, after all, aren’t your standard captains of industry.

Vice President Joe Biden is headed to Poland on Monday night in a show of solidarity with leaders there and other Eastern European NATO allies. Obama will be in Brussels next week to press the case himself.

But so far, despite all the tough talk and long phone calls between Obama and Putin, the Russians have proceeded exactly as they said they would, despite multiple explicit warnings from America and its allies: Troops came to Crimea and stayed. A referendum was announced and held. Putin formally recognized Crimea as a sovereign state Monday, and seems set to go through with Tuesday plans to address the Russian Duma, where he is expected to urge them to accept widely-ridiculed results from Sunday’s vote — a solid 95.3 percent in favor of seceding from Ukraine — and possibly proceed with annexing the peninsula. Meanwhile, Russian troops aren’t going anywhere.

The crisis continues, even after the White House used scare quotes to refer to the “referendum,” and an American official spent Monday morning equally sarcastically flagging “fun facts”: ballots arrived pre-marked, over 100 percent of people in the Crimean capital seemed to have voted, and there wasn’t a single complaint to the election commission.

( Also on POLITICO: Crimea parliament declares independence after vote)

The public Russian response to Monday’s announcement from the White House ranged from apathetic to sneering. There wasn’t a whole lot of shivering from Obama’s promise that “further provocations will do nothing except to further isolate Russia and diminish its place in the world.”

Rather than showing any signs of taking the “off ramp” Obama and his aides have been urging for weeks, or concern about the decline in the Russian stock market or value of the ruble that American officials proudly point to as signs that their approach is working, Putin’s posture is more like the bored-looking giant brown bear that his deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozinm tweeted Saturday. Staring into the camera, a bottle of vodka on a table next to him, the bear’s photo featured two words written underneath, in Russian: “awaiting sanctions.”

Responding to being one of the people named for the sanctions, Rogozin offered another bear yawn, tweeting: “I think some prankster prepared the draft of this Act of the US President,” and adding a few minutes later, “Here it finally came to me: the real world-wide acclaim)) I thank the Washington Obkom! (Province Party Committee).”

And Putin himself continues on course. He has not officially raised the Russian flag over the Crimean parliament, but he’s expected to. He has not moved troops further east into Ukraine, but what was seen as a long shot just two weeks ago is now being talked about more credibly.

( PHOTOS: Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin’s relationship)

“I believe he is calculating the credibility of his opponents on a daily basis,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wy.) said of Putin Monday morning on MSNBC.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who led a delegation of senators, including Barrasso, to Kiev over the weekend, released a statement saying Monday’s move was a good step, but not nearly enough.

“In the absence of a stronger U.S. and Western response to this aggression, we run the risk of signaling to Putin that he can be even more expansive in furthering his old imperial ambitions, not only in Ukraine, but also in Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltic countries, and parts of Central Asia,” McCain said.

In addition to Monday’s news of significantly expanded U.S. sanctions, McCain called for more humanitarian and modest military assistance to be rushed to Ukraine.

“The crisis in Ukraine is about more than Ukraine,” McCain said. “It is also about the credibility of America’s global leadership and whether the future will be defined by the values of the West, or by dictators and aggressors who think they can bully the free world into submission.”