“The United States is taking additional steps to ensure that the Kremlin and its forces feel the compounding effects of our response to the Kremlin’s reckless war of aggression,” US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said in a statement announcing the measures. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said her agency would “use every tool at our disposal to make sure Russian elites and Kremlin officials are held accountable for their complicity in a war that has cost countless lives.” The finance ministry said it had sanctioned a number of Kremlin-linked elites, including Alina Kabaeva, a former Olympic rhythmic gymnast and lawmaker who the US described as having “close ties to Putin”. It also included a large multinational corporation, a yacht and a sanctions-busting business among other entities it had hit with restrictions. Kabaeva, who chairs the board of a media company owned by some of Putin’s closest allies, was hit with sanctions from the UK and the EU earlier this year. Putin has said little about his private life since divorcing his first wife, Lyudmila Ocheretnaya, in 2013. His eldest daughters Maria and Katerina run state-funded science programs and occasionally appear in public under pseudonyms . Russian tabloids, however, have reported that Putin has been in a relationship with Kabaeva since 2008, when a newspaper was shut down after claiming the two were engaged. The US also imposed sanctions on father-and-son chemical tycoons Andrey Guryev, founder of fertilizer producer PhosAgro, and his son, also Andrey, the company’s former CEO.

The elder Guriev owns Witanhurst, the second-largest home in London after Buckingham Palace, and the Alfa Nero, a yacht he bought for $120 million in 2014. The US described Guriev as a “known close associate” of Putin, whose PhD supervisor Vladimir Litvinenko owned more than 20 percent of PhosAgro before transferring most of the stake to his wife in May. It also said several other sanctioned oligarchs were “Putin boosters”, including Alexander Ponomarenko, the co-owner of Moscow’s biggest airport, who it said had “close ties to other oligarchs and the construction of Vladimir Putin’s seaside palace ». PhosAgro, fellow fertilizer producer EuroChem, and the airport are not subject to sanctions, the Finance Ministry said. The US and EU issued clarifications exempting Russian agriculture and fertilizer exports from sanctions last month as part of efforts to persuade Moscow to lift its blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports.