The following is an excerpt from “End All Russian Oil and Gas Imports, Including into Europe,” written by Claire Finkelstein, Algernon Biddle Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy along with Richard W. Painter and Eric W. Orts, and recently published at Newsweek:
President Joe Biden’s leadership in addressing Russian aggression in Ukraine has in many ways been masterful. He has inspired unity in NATO, led the way for an economic assault on Russian financial infrastructure and even levied personal sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin himself. Biden has also coordinated efforts to seize assets from Russian oligarchs that have long enabled financial corruption and controlled much of Russia’s economy. He has coordinated with European allies to bar Russia from the SWIFT global banking system, imposed stringent export controls and other measures targeting all 10 of Russia’s largest financial institutions and put restrictions on institutions holding Russian banking sector assets. Perhaps most important, President Biden announced today that the U.S. will ban imports of Russian oil and gas… .
What more can be done without risking a direct military conflict between the U.S. and Russia, such as would likely result from imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine, as Ukrainian President Zelensky has implored the U.S. and NATO to undertake?
The most important economic weapon to use now against Putin is for Europe to join the U.S. in a ban on Russian oil and gas imports… .
Finkelstein is the founder and faculty director of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL), a non-partisan interdisciplinary institute affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC). She is a distinguished research fellow at APPC and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). Her current research addresses national security law and policy and democratic governance with a focus on related ethical and rule of law issues.
Read the entire piece at Newsweek.