Moscow has done little to dispel that reputation of slow-balling the president in recent days. Putin is yet to deliver a memorandum for a peace agreement that he promised shortly after the two leaders spoke on the phone over a week ago.
The Kremlin insists the document is in its final stages and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday proposed fresh direct talks with Ukraine on June 2 at which he said Moscow would hand over its proposal.
Ukraine’s Defense Minister Rustem Umerov accused Russia of delaying the process Wednesday on X, calling on the Kremlin to deliver its memorandum beforehand and pointing out that Kyiv had already done so.
Other advocates of tougher measures against Russia say the U.S. and its allies ought to target Russia’s “shadow fleet” of around 500 shipping vessels used to export Russian oil around the world that has largely evaded oil price cap sanctions imposed by the U.S. and European Union.
White House officials previously feared such a move could trigger higher energy prices with potentially damaging political and economic consequences, but the E.U. and Britain did just that last week as they announced a new raft of sanctions on Russia.
The Biden administration in its final weeks in January also sanctioned 183 Russian vessels.
Such vessels have largely slipped under the West’s gaze by avoiding any contracts for Western services as well as certain types of insurance.
“Russia’s shadow fleet strategy circumvents sanctions by avoiding reliance on Western service providers in the export supply chain, rather than concealing the origins and destinations of their cargoes,” Harvard University Russian oil expert Craig Kennedy said in a recent analysis.
Sanctions have already affected Russia’s oil export revenues: the market price for Urals oil has slipped to $65 a barrel from a peak of $100 a barrel in 2022, shaving an estimated $142 billion off the Russian economy, according to the Kyiv School of Economics.
But that figure has not been as large as previously hoped, said the Harvard Davis Center’s Kennedy.
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