The US should adjust its sanctions against Russia and military and financial support for Ukraine to the realities of a long conflict with no predictable end in sight, experts told a US Senate panel this week.
"I don't think that there is any magic point of leverage that we have," think tank Center for a New American Security senior fellow Andrea Kendall-Taylor told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday. "This really is a long-term confrontation."
Sanctions imposed against Russia after its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine have bifurcated global oil flows and delivered a blow to the Russian government's finances without affecting global supply. The US and its NATO allies are increasingly setting aside priorcaution regarding supplying long-range missiles and sophisticated military equipment to Ukraine.
But Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey) and other senior Republicans and Democrats on the panel have been asking the White House to tighten the sanctions regime and better explain the end goal in Washington's military and diplomatic support for Kyiv and how sanctions will help reach that objective.
"It's clear that existing sanctions and export controls are not crushing the Russian economy in a way that will force you to stop waging war in Ukraine," Menendez said at the hearing, asking the experts: "How can we better leverage sanctions and punitive tools to further cripple Russia's leadership?"
The US and EU sanctions have hit the Russian automobile and airline industries particularly hard and their negative effects on the rest of the economy will be more pronounced over time, Kendall-Taylor said. She called for lowering the $60/bl price cap that the G7 has imposed on Russian crude exports to emerging economies, adding Russian-sourced uranium to the list of commodities banned for imports into the G7 countries and helping EU enforcement efforts by lending expertise from the US government, which has historically applied sanctions more broadly than its counterparts.
There is little appetite within President Joe Biden's administration to tweak the price cap regime that targets Russian oil exports, either by lowering the price cap levels or by preventing third countries from importing Russian crude and exporting products refined from it to the G7 countries that ban direct imports from Russia.
The G7 leaders meeting in Japan on 19-21 May will consider ways to tighten financial restrictions on the Russian economy, but the club of advanced economies is still keen to ensure that Russian oil and gas remain part of global supply.
How longwill it take?
The Biden administration has said it is prepared to support Ukraine "as long as it takes" to defeat Russia, but the White House has also expressed hope that a successful Ukrainian counter-offensive later this year will allow Kyiv to negotiate with Moscow from a position of strength.
But any negotiations with Moscow would run into the credibility issue, former US ambassador to Russia, John Sullivan, told the committee. "After repeated statements from the Russian leadership in early 2022 that they would not attack Ukraine, that they had no plans to do so, why would anyone trust that government," Sullivan said. "The Reagan-era mantra of 'trust but verify' is quaint, it has no application now." Sullivan served in Moscow from 2020 until summer 2022, when he stepped down for personal reasons.
"I don't think the Biden administration or Washington in general has a story about what happens to our support after the (Ukrainian) counter-offensive," Kendall-Taylor said. "That shapes Putin's calculus, it's what convinces him that time is on his side, and that the US will tire."
Sullivan also cautioned against expecting a quick change of government as a result of significant popular unrest in Russia, given the Kremlin's tight control of the media environment and suppression of dissent.
