“I will look you in the eye and tell you, as President Biden looked President Putin in the eye and told him today, that things we did not do in 2014, we are prepared to do now,” Mr. Sullivan mentioned, referring to the 12 months Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula. Virtually no nation has acknowledged the motion, and Western powers proceed to levy sanctions in opposition to Russia for it. But the sanctions have failed of their main goal: to create sufficient ache for Russia that it returns the territory.
In current days, American officers have mentioned {that a} listing of potential penalties being composed by the Treasury Department, in collaboration with European allies, ranges from blocking Russian firms from entry to world capital markets to monetary penalties aimed on the Russian elite, particularly the oligarchs who’ve helped finance and help Mr. Putin.
The most excessive step — one that’s nonetheless being debated — can be to chop Russia off from the worldwide monetary settlement system, known as SWIFT, however some European officers have feared that step would possibly provoke too harsh a response.
Mr. Sullivan additionally held out the opportunity of “an alternative pathway by which we can make progress on diplomacy,’’ describing what would be, in essence, a return to a diplomatic process Russia engaged in six years ago — but has largely ignored since.
Russian officials said the tone of the call was “honest and businesslike.” But Mr. Putin’s key message, the Kremlin maintained, was that Western army exercise was a menace to Russia, and that the United States was elevating tensions within the area by growing its “military potential near our borders.”
What Mr. Putin sees as a purple line, Ukraine and the West see as cheap protection for a rustic that already misplaced management of Crimea — nonetheless “occupied territory” within the United States’ description — and has been engaged in a conflict of attrition in Donbas, within the east.
Since the Crimea takeover, the United States has dedicated greater than $2.5 billion in safety help, together with air surveillance radars, counterartillery radars, drones, safe communications armed patrol boats and, most significantly, Javelin anti-tank techniques. The final of these have nervous Russian army leaders sufficient that among the tanks seen massing on the borders are sporting new deflectors, like a metallic umbrella, to deceive the missile’s homing techniques.