Department Press Briefing – April 21, 2022

MR PRICE: Good afternoon.

QUESTION: Good afternoon.

MR PRICE: So I have just a few thoughts at the top, and then I’ll take your questions, and it’s really about what we have seen over the past 48 or so hours. And because over the past 48 hours, you’ve heard a series of announcements emanate both from Washington and Moscow. And it’s worth, I think, spending just a moment contrasting what we’ve said and what we have heard emanate from the Kremlin.

First you heard from President Biden this morning of the additional and very significant steps that we are taking for our Ukrainian partners to support their security, their political, their economic, their financial, and their humanitarian needs. And we can offer a bit of detail on each of those.

First, as you all know, the President announced another $800 million in arms, munitions, and equipment from DOD inventories to support Ukraine’s forces, bringing our total security assistance since the start of Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine to approximately $3.4 billion. That total is about $4 billion since the start of the administration. We also announced today an additional $500 million in direct budgetary support for the Government of Ukraine, bringing that total in the past few weeks to $1 billion.

To provide opportunities for Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression, the newly unveiled Uniting for Ukraine program will provide a new streamlined process for Ukrainians coming to the United States, and to impose further costs on Russia, which is an important pillar of our strategy, the President announced a ban on – for Russia-affiliated ships coming to U.S. ports. That means no Russia-flagged ship and no ships owned or operated by Russian interests will be allowed to dock in the United States.

All of this, of course, follows yesterday’s announcement of Department of the Treasury efforts to crack down on those attempting to evade our unprecedented sanctions and the Department of State actions to impose visa restrictions on more than 650 – 655 – Russian and Belarusian officials and proxy so-called authorities in response to reports of war crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukraine.

So that’s what we’ve said over the past several hours. Meanwhile, what have we heard from Moscow? We’ve heard the Kremlin literally brag of plans to starve, to seal off, the brave Ukrainians who have sought to do nothing more but defend their country and the besieged city of Mariupol. And the Kremlin have even honored those, fêted those, responsible for what has to be one of the most horrifying and despicable acts and operations on European soil since the end of the Second World War, and that is the brutal assault on Mariupol’s civilian population, the full toll of which remains obscured.

Today, we also heard the Russians enact their latest sanctions. In addition to the Vice President, today’s tranche included journalists and spokespeople for this administration, myself included. I have to say, it is nothing less than an accolade to have earned the ire of a government that lies to its own people, brutalizes its neighbors, and seeks to create a world where freedom and liberty are put on the run and, if they had their way, extinguished. Similarly it is a great honor to share that enmity with other truth-tellers, my colleagues John Kirby, Jen Psaki, as well as a number of journalists who have done incredible work sharing the jarring, bloody truth of Russia’s actions in Ukraine. It is the clearest signal we could ask for that the Russian Government sees truth as an enemy in this battle, literally pursuing those who are doing nothing more than trying to spread that truth, and they see that as an enemy in that battle that they are very clearly losing.

So with that, happy to take your questions.

QUESTION: Thanks, Ned. Welcome back. I trust your Panama experience was truly palindromic and —

MR PRICE: We missed you.

QUESTION: You get that, right?

MR PRICE: I do. I do. And we missed you very much.

QUESTION: And I guess congratulations on your – the honor that you’ve so happily accepted from the Russian Government. Just on the actions that were taken yesterday, and then I got two extremely brief non-Ukraine questions. On the visa bans that the Secretary imposed, do you have any idea how many of those people – and I know you’re not naming them, and I know that in some cases you can’t name them – but how many actually had visas? So in other words, how many were actually notified that an existing visa in their passport book has been revoked? Do you know how many that is? And at the same time, do you know how many do not have valid – do not currently have valid visas?

MR PRICE: Well, so we announced really two things yesterday, Matt. There were two elements of this. The Department of the Treasury designated entities and individuals involved in attempting to evade the sanctions that have been posed…