On January 10, 2025, the American Presidency Project published a written “Statement by Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economics and Deputy Director of the National Economic Council Daleep Singh on Today’s Sanctions Actions.” In that statement he said the United States had “imposed the most significant sanctions yet on Russia’s energy sector, by far the largest source of revenue for Putin’s war,” hitting “every key node of Russia’s oil production and distribution chain, including against two of the four largest Russian oil producers, dozens of oilfield service providers, traders of Russian oil across the world, over 150 vessels moving seaborne Russian oil, and an oil terminal that knowingly received sanctioned oil from sanctioned vessels.” Treasury, he wrote, would rescind a provision that had exempted intermediation of energy payments from sanctions on Russian banks.
He asked why the administration had waited “for the end of the Administration to introduce sanctions on Russian oil.” His answer: “for sanctions to be successful, they must be sustainable,” and “until recently, we were constrained by tight supply in global energy markets, which meant that reducing Russia’s oil exports to the world would likely push up Putin’s export revenues while raising prices at the gas pump for families in the United States and across the world.” He cited the December 2022 price cap, said oil markets were “in a fundamentally better place,” and wrote that since the start of the war “benchmark oil prices have fallen almost $35 per barrel and average U.S. gasoline prices have dropped from roughly $4 to just over $3 per gallon.” He also described immobilized Russian central-bank assets and a G7 $50 billion loan structure, including a U.S. “$20 billion share.”
The Epoch Times, January 10, 2025 (updated January 12), reported the U.S.–UK energy package and said Singh, in a statement shared with the paper, used the same “every key node” sentence and: “With less capital, less technology, and less talent, the endgame facing Moscow is further descent into a smaller, weaker, and isolated pariah state.” That second sentence also appears in the official statement. Epoch Times reported a senior official’s claim that many of the measures had been recommended by Republican lawmakers, including incoming national security adviser Rep. Mike Waltz, and that prohibitions would take effect February 27, after the incoming administration took office. Those are Epoch Times’s reporting lines, not Singh’s signed statement.