The Biden administration is preparing to announce sanctions in response to a massive Russian hacking campaign that breached vital federal agencies.
The action is also in response to election interference, a senior administration official said on Wednesday night.
The sanctions, foreshadowed for weeks by the administration, would represent the first retaliatory action announced against the Kremlin for last year’s hack, familiarly known as the SolarWinds breach.
In that intrusion, Russian hackers are believed to have infected widely used software with malicious code that enabled them to access the networks of at least nine agencies, part of what US officials believe was an operation aimed at mining the secrets of the American government.
The measures are to be announced on Thursday, according to the official, who was not authorised to discuss the matter by name and spoke on condition of anonymity.
It was not immediately clear what, if any, other actions might be planned, and officials had previously said they expected to take actions both seen and unseen.
The measures are intended to send a clear retributive message to Russia and to deter similar acts in the future.
They come amid an already tense relationship between the US and Russia, with US President Joe Biden telling Russian President Vladimir Putin this week that the US would “act firmly in defence of its national interests” regarding Russian intrusions and election interference.
But it remained unclear whether the actions would actually result in changed behaviour, especially since past measures by the US have failed to bring an end to Russian hacking.
US officials are still grappling with the after-effects of the SolarWinds intrusion, which affected agencies including the Treasury, Justice, Energy and Homeland Security departments, and are still assessing what information may have been stolen.
The breach exposed vulnerabilities in the supply chain as well as weaknesses in the federal government’s own cyber defences.
The actions would represent the second major round of sanctions imposed by the Biden administration against Russia.
Last month, the US sanctioned seven mid-level and senior Russian officials, along with more than a dozen government entities, over a nearly fatal nerve-agent attack on opposition leader Alexei Navalny and his subsequent jailing.
