US issues 'Putin list' of Russian politicians, oligarchs

The Trump administration has released a long-awaited list of 114 Russian politicians and 96 "oligarchs" who have flourished under President Vladimir Putin, fulfilling a demand by Congress that the US punish Moscow for interfering in the 2016 US election.
The political list is the entire presidential administration, as listed on the Kremlin website, and the Russian Cabinet, while the oligarchs list is a carbon copy of the top of the Forbes magazine's Russian billionaires' list.
The publication of the so-called "Putin list" angered and dismayed many in Moscow.
Yet the administration paired that move with a surprising announcement that it had decided not to punish anybody - for now - under new sanctions retaliating for the election- meddling. Some US lawmakers accused President Donald Trump of giving Russia a free pass, fueling further questions about whether the president is unwilling to confront Moscow.

The idea of the seven-page unclassified document, as envisioned by Congress, is to name-and-shame those believed to be benefiting from Putin's tenure, just as the US works to isolate his government diplomatically and economically.
Being on the list doesn't trigger any US sanctions on the individuals, although more than a dozen are already targeted under earlier sanctions.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is among the 114 senior political figures in Russia's government who made the list, along with 42 of Putin's aides, Cabinet ministers such as Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and top officials in Russia's leading spy agencies, the FSB and GRU. The CEOs of major state-owned companies, including energy giant Rosneft and Sberbank, are also on the list.

So are 96 wealthy Russians deemed "oligarchs" by the Treasury Department, which said each is believed to have assets totaling USD 1 billion or more. Some are the most famous of wealthy Russians, among them tycoons Roman Abramovich and Mikhail Prokhorov, who challenged Putin in the 2012 election. Aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, a figure in the Russia investigation over his ties to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, is included.
There are also odd ones out on the list, however, such as Sergei Galitsky, founder of retail chain Magnit, and Arkady Volozh, founder and CEO of the search engine Yandex. Both have been lauded as self-made men who built their successful businesses without any government support.

Even more names, including those of less-senior politicians or businesspeople worth less than USD 1 billion, are on a classified version of the list being provided to Congress, officials said.
Drawing on US intelligence, Treasury also finalized a list of at least partially state-owned companies in Russia, but that list, too, was classified and sent only to Congress.
Russian politicians have expressed dismay at finding that the list included the entire Russian government.
Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich told Russian news agencies today that he was not surprised to find his name on the list, too, saying that it "looks like a 'who's who' book." Dvorkovich stopped short of saying how Russia would react to it, saying that the government would "monitor the situation."

In a Facebook post, Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Federation Council's foreign affairs committee, said US intelligence failed to find compromising material on Russian politicians and "ended up copying the Kremlin phone book."
Kosachev criticized the US government for harming Russia-US relations, saying that "the consequences will be toxic and undermine prospects for cooperation for years ahead," adding that the list displays "political paranoia" of the US establishment.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who came to prominence thanks to his investigations into official corruption, tweeted that he was "glad that these (people) have been officially recognized on the international level as crooks and thieves."

Navalny in his investigations has exposed what he described as close ties between government officials and some of the billionaires on the list.
In the works for months, the list has induced fear among rich Russians who are concerned that it could lead to US sanctions or to being informally blacklisted in the global financial system.
It triggered a fierce lobbying campaign, with Russia hawks in Congress pushing the administration to include certain names and lobbyists hired by Russian businessmen urging the administration to keep their clients off.
The list's release was likely to at least partially defuse the disappointment from some lawmakers that Trump's administration opted against targeting anyone with new Russia sanctions that took effect yesterday.

Under the same law that authorised the "Putin list," the government was required to slap sanctions on anyone doing "significant" business with people linked to Russia's defense and intelligence agencies, using a blacklist the US released in October. But the administration decided it didn't need to penalize anyone, even though several countries have had multibillion-dollar arms deals with Russia in the works.
State Department officials said the threat of sanctions had been deterrent enough, and that "sanctions on specific entities or individuals will not need to be imposed.