AP Photo Washington And The World The Other Russia Scandal This Week What you missed while you were obsessing about #ReleaseTheMemo.

Michael Carpenter is senior director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia.

The Trump administration’s stunning decision this week to forgo mandatory sanctions on individuals doing business with Russia’s defense and intelligence sectors and its failure to publicly name and shame corrupt Kremlin insiders only underscores its dereliction of duty and disregard for our national security. With fitting symbolism, the administration chose instead to invite the directors of the three Russian intelligence services—the very agencies responsible for carrying out an attack on our election—for an unprecedented joint visit to Washington. To repeat: This is something that has never happened before in American history.

Trump officials falsely argued that sanctions on Russia’s defense and intelligence sectors were unnecessary because the mere threat of sanctions was sufficient to deter businesses from doing deals. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert claimed, for example, that “foreign governments have abandoned planned or announced purchases of several billion dollars in Russian defense acquisitions.”


Perhaps. But aside from the fact that the sanctions, which passed last summer by an overwhelming margin in Congress, were not optional, the evidence suggests Russia’s defense industry is not being deterred from entering new markets. Far from it: Russia is currently in talks with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar—both traditional U.S. arms purchasers—to supply sophisticated S-400 air defense systems, while Russia’s United Aircraft Corporation, a major defense contractor, decided just this month to market new airplanes in Europe and North America. Financial markets also read the administration’s decision to forgo sanctions as a green light, with yields on Russian bonds sinking to the lowest point since the 2014 invasion of Crimea.

Regarding the requirement to compile a “Kremlin list” of corrupt officials, the administration decided to take the easy way out, and simply released a list of officials that could easily have been a copy-and-paste job of the Kremlin phone book and the Forbes Top 100 list of Russian oligarchs. No details on corruption were made public, thereby completely defeating the purpose of the report—naming and shaming those enabling bad behavior in Moscow, and thus establishing a basis for future sanctions against them.

Despite having enormous asymmetric power at its disposal, including the power to block all transactions going through the U.S. financial system, this White House has proven completely unwilling to impose meaningful costs on Russia in response to its assault on our institutions. Meanwhile, the Kremlin’s war machine is still operating in full swing in Ukraine and Syria while defense-sector revenues support Russia’s military modernization, including the development of new systems like treaty-banned intermediate-range cruise missiles that could target U.S. forces and allies in Central Europe and East Asia.

So what to do?

First, we have to wake up to the fact that the United States is a financial superpower and that we have the ability to impose costs on Russia in a way that could permanently change the Kremlin’s calculus. In the financial sector, for example, the U.S. market is so vast that any “blocking sanctions” on Russia’s banks would have an immediate impact by forcing them to withdraw from international markets. Strangely, the United States has decided to take such sanctions entirely off the table, even as the Kremlin doubles down on election interference efforts across Europe, including the recent Czech presidential elections and the March 4 Italian parliamentary elections. Currently, full blocking sanctions, which block all transactions by entities that do business through the U.S. financial system, have been imposed on exactly one Russian bank, Bank Rossiya, which does not even rank in the top 10 Russian financial institutions.

The Trump administration has ignored and subverted the clear will of Congress—and lawmakers therefore have no choice but to respond. They should consider passing an amendment to the Russia sanctions law specifying that unless the administration certifies that Russia has ceased interfering in our democratic institutions, full blocking sanctions will be applied iteratively to a list of select Russian banks according to a fixed schedule—say, every six months. These sanctions would kick in automatically, and the Treasury Department would be able to waive them only if there were evidence of a serious risk of financial contagion.

The goal of such measures is not to crater Russia’s economy but to show that the United States takes an attack on its democracy seriously and will respond with meaningful measures. (The measures the previous administration applied to Russia in December 2016, such as designating Russian Embassy personnel as persona non grata and confiscating Russian diplomatic facilities, were largely symbolic and had no impact on the Kremlin’s long-term calculus.) Until the costs of its subversive measures outweigh the benefits, the Kremlin will keep trying to sow chaos and widen the political, social and ideological divisions within our country. Since the president and his team are unwilling to defend us from Russia’s efforts to weaken our democracy, Congress must step in.