US should have prosecuted violators of sanctions more harshly since 2014 – Politico

The Ministry of Justice of the US investigates very few cases about violating the sanctions imposed against Russia since 2014 and took a tougher stance concerning this issue only after the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Source: American news outlet Politico

Details: Politico analysed the implementation of the sanctions, conducting export control and executing other restrictions against Russia during its almost ten years-long war with Ukraine, which were applied by the Ministry of Justice of the US. The research was based on hundreds of pages of court documents and other materials as well as on interviews with more than ten former American officials who are experienced in the sector of national security and law enforcement.

The review’s findings suggest that, although Washington has since 2014 imposed multiple rounds of sanctions on Russia due to its invasion of Ukraine, the Justice Department under the Obama and Trump administrations did not prioritise prosecutions related to that war, filing relatively few cases until after Putin escalated it in 2022.

Politico applied generous standards for what cases count, finding 14 criminal cases from January 2014 through February 2022. But some of the cases were only tangentially — if at all — related to Ukraine.

Such U.S. prosecutions have spiked in the months since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Prosecutors have filed at least 18 cases involving indictments or charges targeting at least 39 people. But the records also show that the cases often are built on the alleged misdeeds of suspects dating back several years prior, meaning they potentially could have been prosecuted sooner.

Quote: "Politico’s findings support critics who argue that Washington, and the West more broadly, was too lenient toward Russia for too long, especially when it came to Ukraine. Such critics, who include Russian dissidents and Ukrainian activists, say America in particular should have imposed — and enforced — tougher Ukraine-related sanctions and other penalties more often and faster in the wake of the initial 2014 invasion."

More details: The outlet remarks that in March 2022, criminal indictment against Jack Hanick, ex-employee of the Fox News, was unveiled. He was openly helping Konstantin Malofeev, a Russian oligarch, create the pro-Kremlin television empire for years while the latter was under the US sanctions since 2014.

A few weeks before 24 February 2022 Americans secretly detained Hanick in the UK. On 2 March 2022, the Ministry of Justice presented its main tool for the implementation of the American sanctions against Russia – the KleptoCapture operative group. The next day, the institution publicly announced that Hanick was indicted.

The Ministry of Justice of the US touted it as "the first-ever criminal indictment charging a violation of U.S. sanctions arising from the 2014 Russian undermining of democratic processes and institutions in Ukraine."

 "The timing was clearly intended to send a message — the United States was cracking down on those who aid Russia’s incursion into Ukraine. But it also amplified a question on the mouths of many critics: Why hadn’t the United States prosecuted these people years earlier? After all, Russia was already facing U.S. sanctions put in place after it first attacked and occupied Ukraine’s Crimea and other regions in 2014 — a set of penalties designed to deter further aggression. If more cases had been brought, critics maintain, Putin may have been discouraged from pursuing his large-scale invasion in 2022," writes the outlet. 

Justice Department defenders dismiss the idea that U.S. prosecutions could have thwarted Putin’s long-term obsession to fold Ukraine into Russia. They point to several potential reasons the department didn’t prosecute Hanick and others sooner, from the fact that such investigations take time and must meet a high bar to the argument that it wasn’t until 2018, amid anger over Russian interference in U.S. elections, that the U.S. really began aiming sanctions at Russians with significant exposure to the U.S. financial — and legal — system.

Above all, former U.S. prosecutors said they were hampered by a lack of cooperation from other countries, even allies such as the UK, when they wanted to go after sanctions evaders. Nonetheless, it is unclear if before 2022, the Ministry of Justice of the White House put enough pressure on other countries to encourage them to cooperate.

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