- Biden said Thursday that he's authorizing "additional strong sanctions" against Russia.
- His comments come as Ukraine strains to fend off a large-scale and unprovoked invasion by Russia.
- Biden said the sanctions were designed to minimize the impact on the US and its allies.
President Joe Biden on Thursday announced that the US will impose a second, harsher round of sanctions on Russia following its large-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Biden announced that he had authorized "additional strong sanctions" and "new limitations" on what can be exported to Russia. "We have purposely designed these sanctions to maximize the long term impact on Russia and minimize the impact on the United States and our allies," Biden said.
"We will limit Russia's ability to do business in dollars, euros, pounds and yen to be part of the global economy," the president said of the sanctions. "We're going to stop the ability to finance and grow the Russian military. We're going to impair their ability to compete in a high-tech 21st-century economy."
The president's remarks came after he met with G7 members to coordinate a more severe response after Russian troops moved in on Ukraine from its northern, eastern, and southern borders, advancing by land, air, and sea.
An estimated number of more than 150,000 Russian troops amassed around Ukraine's borders over the last several months — one of the largest troop buildups since World War II — and launched a massive offensive on several Ukrainian cities using troops, artillery, tanks and other vehicles beginning on Thursday.
Oleksiy Arestovich, an advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said that more than 40 Ukrainian soldiers were killed and dozens more were injured on Thursday morning, according to The New York Times.
Russian forces also entered the Chernobyl exclusion zone — one of the most radioactively contaminated areas in the world and a possible pathway to the capital city of Kyiv — that surrounds the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.
BuzzFeed News' Christopher Miller cited a Ukrainian advisor to the head of Chernobyl's nuclear power plant as saying that "after a fierce battle [with Russian forces], Ukrainian control over the Chernobyl site was lost."
"The condition of the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant, confinement, and nuclear waste storage facilities is unknown," the advisor, Mykhailo Podoliak, said.
Late Wednesday night, shortly after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that he was ordering a "special military operation" in Ukraine, Biden that the US together with its partners was prepared to impose harsher consequences on Russia. The move would come after the US and several allies imposed sanctions targeting Russian banks, economic institutions, and oligarchs earlier this week.
Ukrainian officials as well as some Baltic states that are part of the NATO alliance said in the wake of Putin's invasion that Russia should be cut off from Swift, or the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. Swift was launched in 1973 and serves as a neutral platform for banks to communicate about transfers, transactions, and trades.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also expressed support for the move, but the US and some European Union members including Germany have pushed back on the idea amid concerns that ejecting Russia from Swift could hurt innocent Russians and European creditors as much as Putin and his allies.
This article is breaking and will continue to be updated.
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