The Trump administration has declined to impose sanctions against companies and foreign countries doing business with blacklisted Russian defense and intelligence entities.
The administration was required by law to name the companies and individuals Monday, and possibly sanction them under a 2016 law meant to punish Russia for its interference in the 2016 US election, as well as its human rights violations, annexation of Crimea and ongoing military operations in eastern Ukraine.
A State Department official said that the administration had decided to put foreign governments and private sector entities “on notice … that significant transactions with listed Russian entities will result in sanctions.”
“Sanctions on specific entities or individuals will not need to be imposed because the legislation is, in fact, serving as a deterrent,” the official said.
CNN has learned that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson signed off this morning on the measures, due today under a law called the “Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act,” or CAATSA. State Department officials also briefed senators earlier today.
State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the department had told Congress that the legislation was being implemented in such a way as to deter Russian defense sales. “Since the enactment of the CAATSA legislation, we estimate that foreign governments have abandoned planned or announced purchases of several billion dollars in Russian defense acquisitions,” she said in a statement.
The State Department official said that, “given the long timeframes generally associated with major defense deals, the results of this effort are only beginning to become apparent.”
The Treasury Department was expected to release Monday the list of companies and individuals doing business with the Russian entities, along with two reports, all of them mandated by law. One report is expected to list wealthy Russian oligarchs with close ties to Putin, and a second is expected to outline the impact of imposing sanctions on Russia’s sovereign debt.
In an unclassified letter to the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Tillerson wrote that he had instructed “all diplomatic posts” to reach out to their host nations and make “clear that we intended to robustly implement the law, that transactions determined to be significant were sanctionable, and that we would re-engage where necessary with more specific outreach.”
CAATSA was one of the first pieces of major legislation that Congress sent to President Donald Trump, who has refused to acknowledge fully Russia’s interference and has cast doubt on the consensus opinion of US intelligence agencies that Moscow interfered in the 2016 elections.
CAATSA passed with broad bipartisan support, clearing the Senate by a vote of 98-2, though Trump signed it into law reluctantly, declaring it “seriously flawed.” Among other things, the law limits the President’s ability to remove sanctions on Russia without lawmakers’ approval. It set two deadlines.
After the first missed deadline on October 1, Tillerson came under sharp criticism from lawmakers from both parties who questioned why the Trump administration was almost a month late in meeting the deadline and whether the delay reflected reluctance from the White House to further sanction Moscow.