US Senate panel close to approving ‘mother of all sanctions’ against Russia

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The leaders of the Senate foreign relations committee said on Sunday they were on the cusp of approving “the mother of all sanctions” against Vladimir Putin, warning there would be no appeasement as the Russian president contemplates an invasion of Ukraine.

“We cannot have a Munich moment again,” the panel’s Democratic chair, Bob Menendez of New Jersey, told CNN’s State of the Union, referring to the 1938 agreement by which allies ceded parts of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, believing it would stave off war.

“Putin will not stop if he believes the west will not respond,” Menendez said. “We saw what he did in 2008 in Georgia, we saw what he did in 2014 in pursuit of Crimea. He will not stop.”

Menendez said he believed bipartisan negotiations for a severe package of sanctions against Putin were “on the one-yard line”, despite disagreements with Republicans over whether they should be imposed before or after any Russian invasion.

Tensions on the Ukraine border continued to escalate over the weekend with Reuters reporting the Russian military build-up included supplies of blood in anticipation of casualties. The UK government promised to ramp up sanctions against Putin and his associates to deter aggression.

“There is an incredible bipartisan resolve for support of Ukraine, and an incredibly strong bipartisan resolve to have severe consequences for Russia if it invades, and in some cases for what it has already done,” Menendez told CNN in a joint interview with his committee’s Republican ranking member, James Risch of Wisconsin.

“We are building on the legislation that both Senator Risch wrote independently, and I wrote, which I called the mother of all sanctions. It’s to include a variety of elements, massive sanctions against the most significant Russian banks, crippling to their economy, Russia sovereign debt. These are sanctions beyond any that we have ever levied before.”

Risch said talks had been a “24 hour-a-day effort for the last several days” in an attempt to reach agreement over timing and content of the package, and that he was optimistic.

“That’s a work in progress,” Risch said, when pressed over discussions about pre-emptive sanctions or measures to be taken in the event of an invasion. “[But] I’m more than cautiously optimistic that when we get back to DC tomorrow that we’re going to be moving forward.”

Menendez said he believed western allies did not have to wait to start penalising Putin.

“There are some sanctions that could take place up front because of what Russia has already done, cyber attacks on Ukraine, false flag operations, the efforts to undermine the Ukrainian government internally,” he said.

“But then the devastating sanctions that ultimately would crush Russia’s economy, and the continuing lethal aid that we are going to send, means Putin has to decide how many body bags of Russian sons are going to return to Russia.

“The sanctions we’re talking about would come later on if he invades, some sanctions would come up front for what has been done already, but the lethal aid will travel no matter what.”