Congressmen Steve Cohen (TN-09) and John R. Curtis (UT-03) today wrote to President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken recommending sanctions against the Deposit Insurance Agency of Russia for its actions protecting sanctioned oligarchs and targeting Kremlin opponents. Congressman Cohen is the Co-Chairman of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, also known as the Helsinki Commission.
The letter reads in part:
“We are writing to bring your attention to a Russian entity that we believe the U.S. government should closely examine with regards to future sanctions potential. The entity we refer to here is the Deposit Insurance Agency of Russia (also known as the “DIA”)…
“In practice, we have been briefed that the DIA leads Kremlin-directed efforts to nationalize the assets of targeted Russian financial institutions, funneling the assets of privately owned businesses to now-sanctioned Russian state banks such as Sberbank, VTB and Gazprombank. We are told that many of the businesses that the DIA targets on behalf of the Central Bank of Russia are owned by shareholders and entrepreneurs who lack sufficient political protection from these kinds of schemes or have been blacklisted as political targets of the Russian state…
“By taking actions to target the DIA directly, the U.S. government can play a key role in cutting off Russia’s long arm of oppression abroad and limit its ability to fund Putin’s war chest. Sanctioning the DIA will not only hamper its ability to expropriate assets from privately held Russian financial businesses, but also help defend brave Russian dissidents and opponents of Putin abroad from predatory attacks by unscrupulous American and European law firms in the employ of the DIA.”
Original source can be found here.
