Lawmakers and experts are hoping for the best after the Treasury Department released what was seen as an underwhelming, congressionally-required public report on Russian oligarchs and senior political figures late Monday night.
Kremlin elites had anxiously anticipated the report, and some reportedly tried to avoid being named on it. Though the list does not itself impose sanctions, experts expected it to create an aura of financial risk around those called out, thereby “naming and shaming” Putin’s inner circle.
But the unclassified list of 96 oligarchs’ names released late Monday appeared to be—and, as a Treasury Department official later confirmed to BuzzFeed—indeed was, derived from Forbes’ 2017 richest Russians list and “publicly available sources.”
“That’s not the way it should’ve been done,” said Ben Cardin, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. With a laugh, he added that the list was “giving a lot of credibility to Forbes.”
Some Russia experts were taken aback by the final public product. “The list is extremely broad,” said Ilya Shumanov, deputy director of Transparency International in Russia. “It would not be an exaggeration to compare it with a list of Forbes’ top-100 Russian entrepreneurs, googled by a negligent intern.”
Daniel Fried, who served as State Department sanctions policy coordinator in the Obama administration and spent forty years in the Foreign Service, told reporters Tuesday that he was puzzled by the seemingly hastily assembled list. In one case, he said, it appears “to replicate a technical error from the Russia Forbes list.”
Fried said that he had been under the impression that the administration was taking the report seriously, and “had proceeded with diligence to compile a serious list of the Putin power structure.”
“I think that’s what the administration, at the professional level, had been preparing,” he said. “I don’t know why the administration saw it to its advantage to go another route and simply slap something together. It’s odd.”
“The public list was so broad, and so inclusive, and so un-discriminatory, that it undercut the clear purpose of [the legislation], which is not to go after all rich Russians, or corrupt, rich Russians, but to go after the Putin power structure,” Fried said.
His colleague at the Atlantic Council, Anders Aslund, who with Fried authored a paper advising the administration on the report ahead of its release, said Tuesday that the list had been changed “at the last minute.”
“Somebody high up—no one knows who at this point—threw out the experts’ work and instead wrote down the names of the top officials in the Russian presidential administration and government plus the 96 Russian billionaires on the Forbes list,” Aslund wrote. “In doing so, this senior official ridiculed the government experts who had prepared another report, rendering [the underlying legislation] ineffective and mocking U.S. sanctions on Russia overall.”
Still, Fried and others are holding out hope that a classified annex provided to congressional committees is more substantive and methodically crafted.
“If that list is a credible and strong list, then its existence may have some deterrent value,” he told reporters, but he said the administration needs to “work on its messaging to make sure that is understood.”
Asked about the oligarch report, a congressional committee aide reminded TWS that it contains “a classified component . . . that most people probably can’t speak to.”
“It also sets the stage for future action, so we view the list as progress,” the aide said.
Treasury Department secretary Steve Mnuchin said Tuesday that the classified version of the report is “hundreds of pages” and the result of “an extraordinary amount of work.” He also told lawmakers that “there will be sanctions that come out of this report.”
Senate Foreign Relations committee chairman Bob Corker, who said Tuesday that he was encouraged by the administration decision to hold off on imposing some Russian sanctions, did not seem as satisfied with the oligarch list.
“Ehhh, you know, it’s okay,” he told TWS. “It’s like a Forbes 400, I realize. But, it’s fine.”
His House counterpart, chairman Ed Royce, on Tuesday described the report as “substantive” and sent a letter to the Treasury Department requesting a review of whether any of those listed should face additional sanctions under existing authorities.
In addition to the 96 oligarchs, Monday’s report featured the names of 114 senior political figures, bringing the total of influential Russians named in the document to 210. The list of political figures also mimicked those listed on the Kremlin website.
