US to host top officials from 30 countries in effort to escalate crackdown on Russian defense supply chains

By Phil Mattingly, CNN

Top officials from 30 countries are scheduled to meet next week with senior US sanctions and intelligence officials as the Biden administration continues to escalate its efforts to strangle Russia’s military industrial complex.

The meeting will serve as a critical opportunity for senior officials from across the Western sanctions coalition to detail where the effort has effectively blocked or shattered critical supply networks, as well as share intelligence and information about ongoing Russian evasion efforts, the official said.

“We’re getting together the countries that are really taking action,” Deputy Treasury Wally Adeyemo told CNN in an interview on the first event of its kind since Russia invaded Ukraine in February. “We’re bringing all 30 countries together to talk about how our attack on Russia’s supply chain is going.”

The meeting comes at an inflection point in the eight-month conflict as Ukraine continues to notch major battlefield gains and Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to escalate his country’s military efforts despite the defeats. US officials and their allies have focused intensively on finding and cracking critical supply chains for a Russian military already facing morale and materiel shortages.

It’s been an effort driven by US market and intelligence information, as well as significant coordination with officials from the Defense Department and Defense Intelligence Agency who bring significant experience with the shape and critical elements of military supply chains.

But the meeting also comes at a moment Russia is desperately engaged in an intensive effort to find work-arounds to the Western coalition’s crackdown in order to maintain the effort, even as it has turned to countries like Iran and North Korea for potential supplies and equipment.

If the Russian central bank’s emergency actions to keep the broader Russian economy afloat amid an avalanche of sanctions marked one key element of the Russian response, the constant search for new shell companies, entities and go-betweens to evade sanctions has been critical to the other. Both have maintained a semblance of productivity despite the scale of the Western efforts, but both face growing pressures — and atrophying stockpiles and supplies — each month that passes.

The Treasury Department will host the October 14 event, which will be co-led by Adeyemo, Deputy Commerce Secretary Don Graves and Deputy Director of National Intelligence Morgan Muir.

Muir’s presence is particularly notable. Adeyemo and Graves serve as point people in the administration’s sanctions effort and head up teams engaged daily with coalition members about sanctions efforts. But Muir, representing the intelligence community at the meeting, signals the goal of providing allies with critical information to tighten their own sanctions efforts.

A goal of the meeting is “to provide information to them that many of them have never received before,” a senior Treasury official said. It’s something that underscores the range of participants in the meeting — and the coalition generally.

While G7 countries have served as the critical players in crafting and implementing the sharpest edge of the economic sanctions and export controls, dozens of other nations have played a significant role in shutting off financial and technological avenues for Putin.

“It’s important to remember that countries from Asia and around the world have taken actions to constrain the Russian military industrial complex,” Adeyemo said.

US officials, relying on the intelligence community’s efforts and extensive assistance from the financial sector, have made tracking those efforts central to their economic war strategy, underscoring the

The meeting will be in person on the margins of the annual fall meetings of the IMF and World Bank, and will include representatives at the deputy finance minister level from Baltic nations, Poland, Japan, Cyprus, the European Commission and New Zealand.

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