WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Biden administration announced sweeping export restrictions against Russia on Thursday, hammering its access to global exports of everything from commercial electronics and computers to semiconductors and aircraft parts.
The controls, announced by the Commerce Department and previously reported by Reuters https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/exclusive-punishing-putin-how-biden-could-cut-russia-off-world-tech-2022-02-22, rely on a dramatic expansion of the so-called Foreign Direct Product rule, forcing companies making high and low tech items overseas with U.S. tools to seek a license from the United States before shipping to Russia.
The rules also instruct the Commerce Department to deny almost all of those license requests.
In a speech at the White House announcing the new controls, President Biden said they would “impose severe costs on the Russian economy both immediately and over time,” noting that allies including 27 members of the European union such as France, Germany and Italy as well as the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand had joined in the response to maximize its impact.
“Between our actions and those of our allies and partners, we estimate that we will cut off more than half of Russia’s high tech imports,” he added.
Biden’s announcement came as Ukrainian forces battled Russian invaders around nearly all of the country’s perimeter on Thursday after Moscow mounted a mass assault by land, sea and air in the biggest attack on a European state since World War Two.
(Reporting by Alexandra Alper, Caitlin Webber, and Karen Freifeld; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)
