Image copyright Reuters Image caption Congress passed the law in August, although President Donald Trump had opposed it

The US has published a list of 114 Russian politicians and 96 oligarchs, some close to the president, as part of a sanctions law aimed at punishing Russia for meddling in the US election. In the end, the list of 114 Russian politicians released just before a Monday evening deadline included the whole of Mr Putin's administration, as listed by the Kremlin on its website, plus the Russian cabinet, all top law enforcement officials and chief executives of the main state-controlled companies. Some U.S. lawmakers accused President Donald Trump of giving Russia a free pass, fueling further questions about whether the president is unwilling to confront America's Cold War foe. “But we're going to refrain from taking these steps for now.”

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The idea behind the list was to name-and-shame those believed to be benefiting from Putin's tenure just as the U.S. works to isolate his government diplomatically and economically. The list, drawn up as part of a sanctions package signed into law in August last year, does not mean those included will be subject to sanctions, but it casts a potential shadow of sanctions risk over a wide circle of wealthy Russians. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is among the 114 senior political figures in Russia’s government who made the list, along with 42 of Putin’s aides, Cabinet ministers such as Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and top officials in Russia’s leading spy agencies, the FSB and GRU. So are 96 wealthy Russians deemed “oligarchs” by the Treasury Department, which said each is believed to have assets totaling $1 billion or more. The publicly released list of oligarchs was in an unclassified version of the Treasury report; the classified version may contain more names, as well as more details, that could be used for sanctions. Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich told Russian news agencies on Tuesday that he was not surprised to find his name on the list, too, saying that it “looks like a ‘who’s who’ book.” Dvorkovich stopped short of saying how Russia would react to it, saying that the government would “monitor the situation.”

In a social media post Tuesday, Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Federation Council’s foreign affairs committee, said U.S. intelligence failed to find compromising material on Russian politicians and “ended up copying the Kremlin phone book.”

Kosachev criticized the U.S. government for harming Russia-U.S. relations, saying that “the consequences will be toxic and undermine prospects for cooperation for years ahead,” adding that the list displays “political paranoia” of the U.S. establishment. Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who came to prominence thanks to his investigations into official corruption, tweeted on Tuesday that he was “glad that these [people] have been officially recognized on the international level as crooks and thieves.” Navalny in his investigations has exposed what he described as close ties between government officials and some of the billionaires on the list. Although he said Russia should not “give in to emotions” before studying the list and its implications carefully, Peskov pointed out the name of the law: “On countering America’s adversaries through sanctions.”

“De facto everyone has been called an adversary of the United States,” he said. State Department officials said the threat of sanctions had been deterrent enough, and that “sanctions on specific entities or individuals will not need to be imposed.”

“We estimate that foreign governments have abandoned planned or announced purchases of several billion dollars in Russian defense acquisitions,” said State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert.
Reports surface about the publication on January 29 by the United States of a list of Russian politicians and oligarchs that the U.S. government was required by CAATSA to draw up. Russian President Vladimir Putin says that the list, on which he is not included, is an "unfriendly act" that complicates ties between the two countries.