https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/07/magnitsky-act-kremlin/535044/
Why Does the Kremlin Care So Much About the Magnitsky Act?
What Russian officials mean when they talk about “adoptions”
Maxim Shemetov / Reuters
JULIA IOFFE JUL 27, 2017
What made Russian officialdom so mad about the Magnitsky Act is that it was the first time that there was some kind of roadblock to getting stolen money to safety. In Russia, after all, officers and bureaucrats could steal it again, the same way they had stolen it in the first place: a raid, an extortion racket, a crooked court case with forged documents—the possibilities are endless. Protecting the money meant getting it out of Russia. But what happens if you get it out of Russia and it’s frozen by Western authorities? What’s the point of stealing all that money if you can’t enjoy the Miami condo it bought you? What’s the point if you can’t use it to travel to the Côte d’Azur in luxury?
Worse, it looked for a while like the Europeans were going to pass a similar law—because Russians stash far more money in Europe than in the United States. And then 2014 hit. Putin invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea, and the United States and European Union teamed up to slap sanctions of some of Putin’s closest lieutenants, freezing their assets and keeping them away from their beloved seaside villas and city condos. In a rare public interview, the banker and close Putin friend Gennady Timchenko, complained of his life under Western sanctions. “Now, I basically can’t leave the country,” he told the TASS state news agency. “My family is spending the summer in the south of France, where we traditionally spend every summer, and I am cut off from all of it. From my family, from my beloved dog, a labrador.” (The labrador, Romy, is the daughter of Connie, Putin’s dog whom he has used to scare German Chancellor Angela Merkel.) Now, with the sanctions, Timchenko, a French and Russian citizen, can’t visit Romy, who lives in Switzerland with his son.
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In all of the drama over the Russian interference in America’s 2016 election, it’s easy to forget just how corrupt Russia is, and how much corruption and money flows still determine the official course of action. The Magnitsky Act so angered the Russians because it targeted what really mattered to them; it went after Russian elites’ raison d’être. It’s why Senator John McCain called it a “pro-Russia” law, and many in the Russian opposition agreed: it went after not the Russian people, but the elites who stole from them with brazen impunity. The law hit the mark so precisely and painfully that the elite lashed out fiercely enough to do what neither the Magnitsky Act nor the 2014 sanctions did: They targeted their own, most vulnerable citizens—as if they haven’t stolen from them enough.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/29/business/energy-environment/russia-venezula-oil-rosneft.html
Russia Uses Its Oil Giant, Rosneft, as a Foreign Policy Tool
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS OCT. 29, 2017
Rosneft is “trying to create opportunities that can be extremely valuable in geopolitical ways,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, an energy security expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “They really give the Russian government unbelievable leverage on questions of importance to the United States.”
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Rosneft, which is 50 percent owned by the Russian state, is led by Igor I. Sechin, a former deputy prime minister and a close Putin ally. After the Russian invasion of Crimea three years ago, the United States and Europe hit Mr. Sechin with sanctions.
Since then, Exxon Mobil and other Western oil companies have been prevented from using their technological expertise to help Rosneft develop deepwater, shale and Arctic oil and gas fields. That has forced Rosneft to go far and wide to find new oil fields to replace its reserves.
Rosneft’s biggest bet so far is Venezuela. Over the past three years, Russia and Rosneft have provided Caracas with $10 billion in financial assistance, helping Venezuela stave off default at least twice under the weight of as much as $150 billion in debt.
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