US issues more sanctions as world continues to react to Bucha atrocities

The worldwide backlash to the photos and videos of dead bodies coming out of Bucha, Ukraine continued with the United States issuing additional sanctions against Russia. The sanctions, announced by the White House Wednesday, target Russian President Vladimir Putin’s two adult daughters, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, the wife and children of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and members of Russia’s Security Council. They also block two of Russia’s largest banks.

“I made clear that Russia would pay a severe and immediate price for its atrocities in Bucha,” President Joe Biden said in a Wednesday tweet. The sanctions came the same day Attorney General Merrick Garland announced “several actions the Justice Department has taken to disrupt and prosecute criminal activity associated with the Russian regime.” These actions included charging Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev with violating U.S. government sanctions and disrupting a cybercrime operation controlled by a Russian military intelligence agency.

“The Treasury Department previously identified Malofeyev as one of the main sources of financing for Russians, promoting separatism in Crimea and providing material support for the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic,” Garland said at a Wednesday news conference. As for the cybercrime operation, “commonly known as the GRU,” Garland added “the Russian government has recently used similar infrastructure to attack Ukrainian targets.”

The sanctions and other U.S. government action came as Kremlin-backed media have denounced the photos and videos from Bucha as an elaborate hoax. Correspondents and hosts of Russian state TV channels said Tuesday that some photo and video evidence of the killings was fake while other evidence showed that Ukrainians were responsible for the bloodshed.

“In the last days, Western and Ukrainian propaganda machines have been working exclusively to fuel hysteria around videos that have been filmed, as we understand, by Ukrainian military, Ukrainian Security Service in Bucha,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Tuesday. “We have all foundations to believe that it was done in order to distract the attention from the talks, distract the attention from the fact that the Ukrainian side has started playing back after the meeting in Istanbul, trying to make new demands.”

However, high-resolution satellite images show some of the dead bodies have been lying on the residential streets of Bucha since early March. This evidence was corroborated by German officials Wednesday.

“Targeted killings by units of the Russian military and security forces are therefore proof that the Russian President and supreme commander has at least approvingly accepted human rights abuses and war crimes to achieve his goals,” German government spokesperson Steffen Hebestreit said. “The assertions made by the Russian side that these are staged scenes or they aren’t responsible for the murders are therefore not tenable.”