Lack of New U.S. Sanctions Allows Russia to Replenish Its War Chest

President Trump has issued no new restrictions on Russia this year, in effect allowing Moscow to acquire the money and materials it needs in its conflict with Ukraine.

The Trump administration’s halting of new sanctions has created an opening for companies to funnel funds and components to President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia.Credit...Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times


By Aaron Krolik
July 2, 2025, 12:01 a.m. ET
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Since President Trump returned to office in January, the United States has issued no new sanctions against Russia related to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In some cases, the administration has eased restrictions. And without new ones, analysts say, existing measures lose their force.

The result has created an opening for new dummy companies to funnel funds and critical components to Russia, including computer chips and military equipment that would otherwise be cut off to the Kremlin, trade and corporate records show.

Sanctions became the center point of the Western-led effort to isolate the country after it invaded Ukraine in 2022. The effort evolved into an international game of cat-and-mouse, as evasion schemes regularly sprang up around the world.

During his presidency, Joseph R. Biden Jr. imposed thousands of so-called maintenance sanctions targeting new schemes. But this year, those actions have come to a standstill, according to a New York Times analysis of restrictions on trade, financial transactions and other activities connected to Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin.

“Trump’s approach to economic statecraft is to impose pressure and get leverage and try to get the best deal possible,” said Edward Fishman, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “For whatever reason, with Russia, he doesn’t want to have any leverage over Putin.”

The Biden administration placed, on average, over 170 new sanctions a month on entities linked to Russia from 2022 to 2024. The targets included oil and weapons production, tech procurement and banking.

In total, the Biden administration imposed more than 6,200 blocks on individuals, companies, vessels and aircraft linked to Russia. In Mr. Biden’s final weeks in office, the United States ramped up pressure even further, issuing nearly three times the monthly average, according to a Times analysis of data from the Treasury Department.

The effects of that pressure are already beginning to erode. A Times review of trade records, online listings and corporate filings identified more than 130 companies in mainland China and Hong Kong that are advertising immediate sales of restricted computer chips to Russia. None of the companies is under sanctions.

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If one company is targeted with restrictions, many others are ready to take its place.

One of these firms, HK GST Limited, advertises chips essential to Russian cruise missiles, including the Kh-101, which was recently used in a strike on Kyiv that killed 10 civilians. The firm was incorporated in Hong Kong nine months ago, and its website was set up in February. An analysis of website hosting data, domain ownership, code patterns and contact details links the company to a network of four similar electronics distributors, including Singaporean-based ChipsX and Carbon Fiber Global, a high-performance drone part manufacturer based in China. All of these companies were set up within the last three years.

Replica Websites

Similar looking websites, often built with the same code and with the same addresses in the domain registries, suggest that the same players are spinning up new businesses to evade sanctions.

Russia Strikes Ukraine in Retaliation for Covert Drone Operation & Other News

 

Russia Strikes Ukraine in Retaliation for Covert Drone Operation - At least three were killed and 49 injured in a missile-and-drone attack that focused on Kyiv, days after a daring assault on Moscow’s bomber fleet.

• Trump administration is seeking to weaken Sen. Lindsey Graham’s Russia-sanctions bill. The White House wants flexibility in applying sanctions to aid Russia ties. Graham’s bill has bipartisan support, though he has said he plans to make at least some changes to the bill.

• The Supreme Court made it easier for workers to sue for reverse discrimination.  The court’s unanimous decision Thursday revives a lawsuit brought by Marlean Ames, who alleged the Ohio state agency where she works denied her a promotion, and then demoted her, because she is heterosexual.

  Trump's new travel ban is expected to be harder to fight in court than the previous version. In its Wednesday proclamation, the Trump administration provided specific rationales, saying several of the countries have unacceptably high temporary-visa overstay rates, necessitating a ban on more of their nationals entering the U.S.

  A judge blocked Trump’s ban on foreign students at Harvard. The federal judge issued a temporary restraining order against the Homeland Security Department that prevents it from “implementing, instituting, maintaining, enforcing, or giving force or effect” to a proclamation Trump issued late Wednesday that prevented foreign nationals from entering the U.S. to study at Harvard University. Israel has been collaborating with a Palestinian militia in Gaza as part of a broader effort to fight Hamas in the enclave. Trump and Xi Jinping spoke on the phone. Trump called it a “very positive” conversation, and the U.S. and China agreed to hold more trade talks. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, said he wanted to expand access to “experimental,” unproven medical treatments like stem-cell and chelation therapies. But he conceded that the industry was rife with fraud.

The mysterious death of a Russian oligarch

 

A Russian oil executive critical of the war in Ukraine died Thursday after reportedly falling out of a Moscow hospital window. [NBC News / Rhoda Kwan] According to state media reports, Ravil Maganov, 67, the chair of Russia’s second-largest oil producer Lukoil, fell to his death. His company said he died “following a serious illness.” [Reuters] After Russia invaded Ukraine, Lukoil's board took the unusual step of expressing sympathy for the victims and called for an end to the conflict. [BBC / Paul Kirby] At least seven other Russian oligarchs — many with ties to the energy sector — have also died this year under mysterious circumstances. [Axios / Jacob Knutson]

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Reformist Soviet Leader,

Adopting principles of glasnost and perestroika, he weighed the legacy of seven decades of Communist rule and set a new course, presiding over the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the U.S.S.R.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev had a profound effect on his time: In little more than six tumultuous years, he lifted the Iron Curtain, transforming the map of Europe and the political climate of the world.Credit...Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

 

By Marilyn Berger

Aug. 30, 2022

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Follow for reactions to the news of Mikhail Gorbachev’s passing.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, whose rise to power in the Soviet Union set in motion a series of revolutionary changes that transformed the map of Europe and ended the Cold War that had threatened the world with nuclear annihilation, has died in Moscow. He was 91.

His death was announced on Tuesday by Russia’s state news agencies, citing the city’s central clinical hospital. The reports said he had died after an unspecified “long and grave illness.”

Few leaders in the 20th century, indeed in any century, have had such a profound effect on their time. In little more than six tumultuous years, Mr. Gorbachev lifted the Iron Curtain, decisively altering the political climate of the world. 

At home he promised and delivered greater openness as he set out to restructure his country’s society and faltering economy. It was not his intention to liquidate the Soviet empire, but within five years of coming to power he had presided over the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He ended the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan and, in an extraordinary five months in 1989, stood by as the Communist system imploded from the Baltics to the Balkans in countries already weakened by widespread corruption and moribund economies. 

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When he came to power, Mr. Gorbachev was a loyal son of the Communist Party, but had come to see things with new eyes. “We cannot live this way any longer,” he once said.Credit...Rex Features, via Associated Press

 For this he was hounded from office by hard-line Communist plotters and disappointed liberals alike, the first group fearing that he would destroy the old system and the other worried that he would not.

It was abroad that he was hailed as heroic. To George F. Kennan, the distinguished American diplomat and Sovietologist, Mr. Gorbachev was “a miracle,” a man who saw the world as it was, unblinkered by Soviet ideology.

But to many inside Russia, the upheaval Mr. Gorbachev had wrought was a disaster. President Vladimir V. Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” For Mr. Putin — and his fellow K.G.B. veterans who now form the inner circle of power in Russia — the end of the U.S.S.R. was a moment of shame and defeat that the invasion of Ukraine this year was meant to help undo. 

“The paralysis of power and will is the first step toward complete degradation and oblivion,” Mr. Putin said on Feb. 24, when he announced the start of the invasion, referring to the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

Mr. Gorbachev made no public statement of his own about the war in Ukraine, though his foundation on Feb. 26 called for a “speedy cessation of hostilities.” A friend of his, the radio journalist Aleksei A. Venediktov, said in a July interview that Mr. Gorbachev was “upset” about the war, viewing it as having undermined “his life’s work.”

When he came to power, Mr. Gorbachev was a loyal son of the Communist Party, but one who had come to see things with new eyes. “We cannot live this way any longer,” he told Eduard A. Shevardnadze, who would become his trusted foreign minister, in 1984. Within five years he had overturned much that the party held inviolable.

A man of openness, vision and great vitality, he looked at the legacy of seven decades of Communist rule and saw official corruption, a labor force lacking motivation and discipline, factories that produced shoddy goods, and a distribution system that guaranteed consumers little but empty shelves — empty of just about everything but vodka.

The Soviet Union had become a major world power weighed down by a weak economy. As East-West détente permitted light into its closed society, the growing class of technological, scientific and cultural elites could no longer fail to measure their country against the West and find it wanting.

The problems were clear; the solutions, less so. Mr. Gorbachev had to feel his way toward his promised restructuring of the Soviet political and economic systems. He was caught between tremendous opposing forces: On one hand, the habits ingrained by 70 years of cradle-to-grave subsistence under Communism; on the other, the imperatives of moving quickly to change the old ways and to demonstrate that whatever dislocation resulted was temporary and worth the effort.

It was a task he was forced to hand over to others when he was removed from office, a consequence of his own ambivalence and a failed coup against him by hard-liners whom he himself had elevated to his inner circle.

The openness Mr. Gorbachev sought — what came to be known as glasnost — and his policy of perestroika, aimed at restructuring the very underpinnings of society, became a double-edged sword. In setting out to fill in the “blank spots” of Soviet history, as he put it, with frank discussion of the country’s errors, he freed his impatient allies to criticize him and the threatened Communist bureaucracy to attack him.

Still, Mr. Gorbachev’s first five years in power were marked by significant, even extraordinary, accomplishments:

■ He presided over an arms agreement with the United States that eliminated for the first time an entire class of nuclear weapons, and began the withdrawal of most Soviet tactical nuclear weapons from Eastern Europe.

■ He withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan, a tacit admission that the invasion in 1979 and the nine-year occupation had been a failure.

■ While he equivocated at first, he eventually exposed the nuclear power-plant disaster at Chernobyl to public scrutiny, a display of candor unheard-of in the Soviet Union.

■ He sanctioned multiparty elections in Soviet cities, a democratic reform that in many places drove stunned Communist leaders out of office.

■ He oversaw an attack on corruption in the upper reaches of the Communist Party, a purge that removed hundreds of bureaucrats from their posts.

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Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931. Misha, as he was known, is seen with his grandparents at age 3.Credit...Associated Press

 ■ He permitted the release of the confined dissident Andrei D. Sakharov, the physicist who had been instrumental in developing the Soviet hydrogen bomb.

■ He lifted restrictions on the media, allowing previously censored books to be published and previously banned movies to be shown.

■ In a stark departure from the Soviet history of official atheism, he established formal diplomatic contacts with the Vatican and helped promulgate a freedom-of-conscience law guaranteeing the right of the people to “satisfy their spiritual needs.”

Mr. Gorbachev’s perestroika was graphically demonstrated when, in a stunning chapter of history, Eastern Europe’s Communist regimes fell, one after another.

In a few euphoric months in 1989, the political architecture of Europe was transformed by popular demand for democracy. Seven countries that had been locked behind the Iron Curtain for more than four decades once again tasted independence. Some historians have ranked 1989 alongside 1789, the beginning of the French Revolution, and 1848, a year of political upheaval throughout Europe, in importance.Image

In a few euphoric months in 1989, the political architecture of Europe was transformed by popular demand for democracy. In December, the playwright Vaclav Havel was elected president of Czechoslovakia.Credit...Lubomir Kotek-Gerard Fouet/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

 There is little question that Mr. Gorbachev was the catalyst of that change. Whatever was to happen within the Soviet Union, Mr. Gorbachev would be remembered as the man who restored Europe to what it was before World War II, a continent of independent national states.

Until he arrived, the Soviet Union had embraced what the West called the Brezhnev doctrine, under which the Kremlin arrogated to itself the right to interfere in the affairs of faltering Communist regimes of the Warsaw Pact.

Brezhnev invoked that right in 1968, when he dispatched Soviet forces to destroy the liberalization movement in Czechoslovakia that became known as the Prague Spring, and Khrushchev did so in 1956, when his army crushed a revolt in Hungary.

Mr. Gorbachev laid that policy to rest. If a regime was failing, he said, it — and it alone — would have to forge a genuine social compact with its people.

But if Mr. Gorbachev was lionized abroad as having helped change the world — he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 — he was vilified at home as having failed to live up to the promise of economic change. It became widely said that in a free vote, Mr. Gorbachev could be elected president anywhere but the Soviet Union.

After five years of Mr. Gorbachev, store shelves remained empty while the union disintegrated. Mr. Shevardnadze, who had been his right hand in bringing a peaceful end to Soviet control in Eastern Europe, resigned in late 1990, warning that dictatorship was coming and that reactionaries in the Communist Party were about to cripple reform.

Peter Reddaway, an author and scholar of Russian history, said at the time: “We see the best side of Gorbachev. The Soviets see the other side, and hold him to blame.”

Russia moves to take Kyiv

 

• Russian troops have entered the Ukrainian capital Kyiv from the north, advancing to the city’s Obolon district. Despite rumors he had fled, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky released a video from the city’s government district, saying, “We are here. We are in Kyiv. We are defending Ukraine.” [Axios / Dave Lawler and Zachary Basu]
• Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, has advocated that the Ukrainian military stage a coup and negotiate with him. “Take power into your own hands,” he said to the soldiers, explaining, “It looks like it will be easier for us to come to an agreement with you than with this gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis who lodged themselves in Kyiv and took the entire Ukrainian people hostage.” [NYT / Anton Troianovski]
• Putin also floated the idea of engaging in talks with Ukraine hosted in Minsk, Belarus. Those negotiations would be predicated on Ukraine “demilitarizing” and agreeing to a nonaligned status, giving up its European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization ambitions. [Reuters]
• Meanwhile, Putin has shored up support from a few strongmen. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad approved of Putin’s invasion, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said his country was with Putin, and Belarus has provided military assistance; but other leaders, like Jair Bolsonaro, who have supported Putin in the past, have remained silent after the invasion. [Washington Post / Terrence McCoy and Chico Harlan]
• Meanwhile, European leaders, as well as those in Britain and the US, have issued a new round of sanctions against Russia, including against Putin. The EU, Britain, and the US have agreed as of Friday to freeze the foreign assets of Putin and his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. [AP / Raf Casert and Aamer Madhani]
• And thousands of Russians throughout the country have risked arrest or worse protesting Putin’s invasion, in cities including Moscow and St. Petersburg. More than 1,800 had been arrested as of Thursday night, and several high-profile Russians risked their livelihoods by speaking out against the war. [Guardian / Andrew Roth]

Putin, warning against interference, says that Russia is a ‘powerful nuclear state.’

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President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia speaking at the Kremlin in Moscow on Thursday.Credit...Russian Presidency, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

2/24/22  

Feb. 24, 2022, 9:39 a

Feb. 24, 2022

Roger Cohen   NY TIMES  

President Vladimir V. Putin has ordered Russian troops into Ukraine but made clear his target goes beyond his neighbor to America’s “empire of lies,” and he threatened “consequences you have never faced in your history” for “anyone who tries to interfere with us.”

In a rambling speech early Thursday, full of festering historical grievances and accusations of a relentless Western plot against his country, Mr. Putin reminded the world that Russia “remains one of the most powerful nuclear states” with “a certain advantage in several cutting edge weapons.”

In effect, Mr. Putin’s speech, intended to justify the invasion, seemed to come close to threatening nuclear war.

In the context of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, Mr. Putin said, “there should be no doubt that any potential aggressor will face defeat and ominous consequences should it directly attack our country.”

President Biden, who said Mr. Putin “had chosen a premeditated war that will bring a catastrophic loss of life and human suffering,” has said that no American troops will be sent to Ukraine. Its European allies have taken the same position.

“We have made it clear that we don’t have any plans and intention of deploying NATO troops to Ukraine,” Jens Stoltenberg, the alliance’s secretary-general, said on Thursday.

Still, history has demonstrated that European wars involving a major global power can spiral out of control.

For Mr. Putin, the invasion of a country bigger than France with a population of 44 million represents a high-risk gamble, beyond any of his past military adventures. It is easy to begin wars, much harder to stop them. The West’s economic sanctions, already coming into force, will be severe, and long-term Ukrainian guerrilla resistance to any Russian presence appears certain.

Still, after his short war in Georgia in 2008, his annexation of Crimea in 2014, his orchestration in 2014 of the military conflict in eastern Ukraine that created two breakaway regions and his military intervention in Syria in 2015, Mr. Putin has clearly concluded that Russia’s readiness to use its armed forces to advance its strategic aims will go unanswered by the United States or its European allies.

“Russia wants insecurity in Europe because force is its trump card,” Michel Duclos, a former French ambassador, said. “They never wanted a new security order, whatever the European illusions. Putin decided some time ago that confrontation with the West was his best option.”

Russia’s audacious military assault is the first major clash marking a new order in international politics, with three major powers jostling for position in ways that threaten America’s primacy, Michael R. Gordon reports. The challenges are different than those the U.S. and its network of alliances faced in the Cold War. Russia and China have built a thriving partnership based in part on a shared interest in diminishing U.S. power. Unlike the Sino-Soviet bloc of the 1950s, Russia is a critical gas supplier to Europe, while China isn’t an impoverished, war-ravaged partner but the world’s manufacturing powerhouse with an expanding military.

The Russian invasion heaped fresh risks on a global economy struggling with soaring inflation, supply-chain snarls and a rocky recovery from the pandemic, Paul Hannon reports.

To Mr. Putin, who never shared the West’s belief in global economic integration, the EU is a threat just like NATO, Greg Ip writes.

Russia To Pull Troops From Ukraine Border, Defusing Crisis

 NPR

SCOTT NEUMAN

A Ukrainian serviceman 

Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images

Russia says it will begin a phased reduction of troops from its border with neighboring Ukraine – apparently ending a deployment that had alarmed Kyiv and Western observers concerned about a possible repeat of Moscow's 2014 annexation of Crimea.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, speaking on Thursday after overseeing drills in Crimea involving more than 10,000 troops, appeared to suggest that the ominous troop buildup on the border was more or less a routine training exercise.

He ordered ground troops to return to bases in Vladikavkaz and Novosibirsk and airborne units to Pskov, Ivanovo and the Krasnodar region, beginning Friday and finishing by May 1. Russian naval forces in the Black Sea were also part of the military exercise.

"I believe that the goals of the snap inspection have been fully achieved," the Interfax news agency quoted Shoigu as saying. "The troops demonstrated the ability to reliably defend the country."

"In this regard, I have decided to complete the Southern and Western military district reviews," he added.

Russian navy warship

Sergei Malgavko/Sergei Malgavko/TASS

Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and is supplying an armed insurgency in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, which borders Russia.

Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, welcomed the de-escalation by Russia but said Kyiv would remain vigilant.

"The reduction of troops on our border proportionally reduces tension," Zelenskiy wrote on Twitter. "Ukraine is always vigilant, yet welcomes any steps to decrease the military presence & deescalate the situation in Donbass."

Shoigu ordered military chiefs to "analyze the snap inspections in all levels of management and draw up a plan to eliminate shortcomings," according to Interfax. He also said that despite the troop reduction, Russia would keep a close tab on planned NATO exercises.

Most of Ukraine was absorbed into the Russian Empire in the late-18th century and Ukraine was a founding republic of the former Soviet Union. It finally gained independence from Moscow with the collapse of the U.S.S.R. Although not currently a NATO member, Ukraine has long expressed a desire to join the Western alliance – a move Russia says would be a "huge strategic mistake."

Earlier this month, Zelenskiy said Ukraine was hoping to hasten progress toward NATO membership and announced that it would take part in joint military exercises known as "Exercise Cossack Mace" with NATO forces later this year.

The Kremlin had rebuffed U.S. and European concern over the buildup, saying it will defend its national interests the way it sees fit. On Wednesday, Putin — who has ignored calls by Ukraine for talks to defuse the situation — warned NATO to stay clear of Russia's "red lines."

Russia ordering troops back to base after their deployment to the border is an important and timely move, a NATO official told Reuters.

"Any steps towards de-escalation by Russia would be important and well overdue," the unnamed NATO official said.

"NATO remains vigilant and we will continue to closely monitor Russia's unjustified military build-up in and around Ukraine," the official said.

NATIONAL SECURITY

Russia Retaliates Against Biden's New Sanctions, Expelling 10 U.S. Diplomats

The tensions in Eastern Europe come at a particularly fraught time for relations between Washington and Moscow, with the U.S. ramping up sanctions against Russia in retaliation for a major cyberattack, the Kremlin's alleged interference in U.S. elections and reports that the Kremlin offered the Afghan Taliban bounty payments to kill American troops stationed there. Putin's government has denied all the allegations.

WORLD

At Least 1,700 Protesters In Russia Arrested After Nationwide Anti-Putin Rallies

Washington has also expressed concern over the health of Russia's main opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, who is in the third week of a prison hunger strike. He is reportedly in precarious health.