The United States and its allies have decided to give Russian President Vladimir Putin a taste of his own medicine. It seems that the Kremlin is unprepared, the Russian journalist Konstantin Eggert writes.
It was anything but dull in the Security Council on Monday, when Russian UN Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya faced off with his US and UK counterparts, Nikki Haley and Karen Pierce, respectively, and the representatives from Sweden, the Netherlands and Poland. There was a surprising reversal of roles in the discussion of Saturday’s suspected chemical weapons attack by Syrian government forces in the town of Douma: The United States and its EU allies pummeled Nebenzya with the rhetorical abandon that had always been the trademark of Russian diplomats.
The drama at the United Nations unfolded at hours after the collapse of Moscow’s stock exchange. Shares of Russia’s state-owned enterprises and financial institutions such as Sberbank, as well as assets owned by the Kremlin-friendly billionaire Oleg Deripaska, took a nosedive. According to various estimates, the capitalization of companies belonging to Russian oligarchs fell by $12-16 billion (€9.7-13 billion) within a few hours. The ruble also took a plunge, losing about 10 percent of its value.
This was the result of the US Department of Treasury’s decision on Friday to publish a new list of Russian individuals and companies to be punished under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. The new sanctions struck Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle much harder than previous rounds had. Apart from Deripaska and Gazprom supremo Alexei Miller, the individuals targeted include Putin’s former aide-de-camp Alexei Dyumin (who is considered in Moscow to be a rising political star and candidate for defense minister) as well as another billionaire, Kirill Shamalov, rumored to be Putin’s (former) son-in-law. Miller put on a brave face in public. The sanctions mean that “we are doing everything right,” he said. This is the standard party line expected from the Kremlin’s top loyalists in moments like these.
Behind the bravado, however, is confusion — hence Putin’s conspicuous silence on the day when the Russian stocks fell, together with the national currency, and the fate of Moscow’s key foreign client, Syria, hung by a thread. His spokesman Dmitry Peskov said only two things: that the Russian state will find ways to support the stricken oligarchs and that US President Donald Trump was wrong to call the Syrian dictator a “beast.” Considering the circumstances, that wasn’t much.
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