Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): To help make sense of today’s developments, our chief foreign affairs correspondent, Margaret Warner, joins us.
So, Margaret, tell us more about what these sanctions do.
MARGARET WARNER (NewsHour): Broadly, Judy, what they try to do is hobble the Russians’ access to both capital and technology in these three key areas, arms, energy and finance.
So, for instance, let’s just take finance. Now — by now, five of the six state-owned Russian banks basically will have no access to medium- and long-term capital or debt, and since they get almost 100 percent of it from U.S. and Western sources, as one U.S. official said today, they’re essentially going to have to shut down.
Private banks aren’t being touched. If you take the arms area, again, they’re going to use export license restrictions to prevent future sales of arms to Russia. And in the energy sector, they’re going to use export license restrictions to prevent Western companies from giving the Russians access to future technologies, particularly in deep water and in shale gas, because the key thing here is, Judy, nothing will interfere here with current projects, whether it’s BP or ExxonMobil in the energy field, the French selling its warships.
What they’re trying to do as much as possible is not hit Western businesses too hard, but make it clear to the Russians that future investments is really going to be crippled.
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