It included everyone, it seemed, except Vladimir Putin. It included the founder of Yandex, the Russian Google, a liberal billionaire who has spent the last decade avoiding the Kremlin’s attempts to control him. It included Russia’s ombudsman for human rights and its presidential commissioner for children’s rights. It included Russia’s prime minister and its foreign minister. It included Moscow’s mayor and the governor of St. “Their anxiety suggests our opportunity.” According to Fried and three other sources familiar with the development of the Kremlin Report, the Fried and Aslund recommendations were expected to produce a serious and targeted list of names.Īnd then, on Tuesday morning, it turned out that the administration’s list was instead an indiscriminate compilation of every Russian billionaire and every senior Kremlin official and minister except Putin himself. “Look at this level of anxiety in Moscow!” Fried said at the time. … You don’t need a big list to show people in Moscow that their interests would be better served by not being part of this inner circle and not messing with the United States.” Fried and Aslund, now both at the Atlantic Council, noticed how nervous “the Russian ruling elite” were. The point, Fried told me shortly after the new year, was to go after “the bag men, the cutouts, the people who were part of the informal system of power. The Trump administration recruited Fried and Anders Aslund, an expert on the Russian economy, for advice on compiling the Kremlin Report’s list of powerful Russians.
According to a source close to the Russian Foreign Ministry, officials discussed bringing Iran under Russia’s military umbrella and increasing military aid to North Korea.
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(He declined.) Meanwhile, the Kremlin considered how to retaliate. (Divorce is a popular way to hide money in Russia.) Some oligarchs were approaching Daniel Fried, who used to handle Russia sanctions at the State Department, to offer him money to help them avoid sanctions. When reports revealed that Putin’s daughter Ekaterina separated from her husband, many speculated that it was a way of splitting up their assets to avoid sanctions. Banks began splitting off their defense-related branches into new entities in order to spare the mothership from sanctions.
One member of the Russian parliament even circulated his own list of Russians, hoping to preempt Washington’s.Īnticipating new sanctions, Putin responded to oligarchs’ December appeal to simplify the process of bringing money back to Russia. Andrei Kostin, the head of the massive state-controlled Russian bank VTB, said that any new American sanctions on Russia would be “a declaration of war.” Stories in the Russian business press speculated about which people could possibly be on the list of oligarchs and political figures, and how many of them. “Our embassy in Moscow says they’re consumed with this and that we should expect blowback,” said one administration source last week. Together, these materials became known as the Kremlin Report, and they were intended to provide the basis for a possible new set of sanctions to punish Russia for election meddling and continued interference in Ukraine. The political and business elite knew that, on January 29, in order to comply with a sanctions bill Congress passed almost unanimously last July, the Trump administration would have to deliver to Congress a list of Russia’s “most significant senior foreign political figures and oligarchs … as determined by their closeness to the Russian regime and their net worth.” Also required was an “assessment of the relationship between individuals” and “President Vladimir Putin or other members of the Russian ruling elite,” and some measurement of their corruption. For months, Moscow waited for this report, churning with a mix of fear and preemptive righteous anger.
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