What did US sanctions on Russia signal in August 2018?
A look back at the sanctions reported in early August 2018 and the Skripal poisoning that prompted one round of them.
What was the picture for Russia–US relations on 9 August 2018? It was shaped by two sets of American sanctions announced in the days just before.
On 3 August 2018, the United States imposed sanctions on a Russian bank that had facilitated a transaction for a North Korean on an American blacklist.
On 8 August 2018, Washington imposed new sanctions on Russia after a Novichok nerve agent was used in the United Kingdom, in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. The United Kingdom had said a day earlier, on 7 August 2018, that it would seek the extradition of suspects from Russia.
Taken together, the reports showed American sanctions being applied on two separate grounds within a single week: a banking link to North Korea, and the nerve agent attack in the United Kingdom. The British move on extradition ran in parallel, adding a legal demand to the financial pressure.
For readers in Kyiv and elsewhere, the sequence of 3, 7 and 8 August 2018 is a useful marker of how quickly such measures could follow one another.
