The US administration's deadline expires on Tuesday morning to determine whether it will impose new sanctions on Russia for poisoning former Russian agent Sergey Scrippel in Britain, or whether Moscow has offered to avoid sanctions under a three-month deadline.
On August 6, the United States imposed a package of sanctions against Russia for the poisoning of Scrippal, after declaring that it had concluded that the Russians had used chemical or biological weapons, in violation of international law, in an attack against their own citizens.
The implementation of the package was announced in two installments, the first of which came into force on Aug. 27, which included a complete ban on the supply of electronic devices and dual-use parts to Russia.
The second package would be imposed if the US State Department announced that Russia would not provide guarantees that it would not use chemical weapons in the future and would be subject to UN inspection under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Act.
The US State Department will have to make its announcement on Tuesday. If it is negative, the second phase of the sanctions will be imposed by reducing diplomatic relations, banning Airflut flights to the United States and reducing the volume of all trade between the two countries.
Last Tuesday, US State Department deputy secretary Robert Paladino said that if it was found that Russia had not provided the required guarantees, the State would have to consult with Congress to impose sanctions.
But the Foreign Office has already passed time limits to impose sanctions against Moscow, before re-imposing all of them, and may be repeated this time as well.
Despite being seen as a kind of rapprochement between the presidents of the two countries, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, Washington under the Trump administration has imposed a long list of sanctions against Moscow on multiple backgrounds, including Ukraine and the failure to respect the Minsk cease-fire agreement and interference in the US elections , The transfer of arms to Syria, the North Korean file and the poisoning of Scrippal.
The package of sanctions against Russia since 2012 has been 60, seven of them since Trump took office in January 2017.
Despite a summit between Trump and Putin in Helsinki, preparations for a second meeting later this month in Argentina and another in Washington next year, this has not been reflected on the sanctions file yet, but observers have dispelled the possibility of confrontation in a number of places, especially Syria, where no The coordination on respect for the rules of engagement between the two sides is continuing, with Washington counting on Moscow's role in getting the Iranian militias out of Syria.
