The US president will announce on Friday that he wants to deprive Moscow of its so-called "most favored nation" trade status, a source familiar with the matter told AFP.

Russia would join Cuba and North Korea, the only countries thus excluded by the world's leading power from the principle of reciprocity which is the basis of most international trade relations.

The final decision on this new sanction, which would be taken in coordination with the G7 and the European Union, rests with regard to the United States in Congress, indicated the same source, confirming information from several American media.

Democratic and Republican members of the same Congress, which shows rare bipartisan momentum on sanctions against Moscow, have already signaled support for ending normal trade relations with Russia.

The US president's schedule for Friday calls for him to speak at 10:15 a.m. local time (3:15 p.m. GMT) to announce new measures in response to Russia's "unprovoked and unjustified war" against Ukraine.

The most favored nation clause - which in the United States is called the "normal permanent commercial relationship" - is a pillar of free trade.

This principle of reciprocity and non-discrimination currently governs most commercial relations between States.

Thus the World Trade Organization (WTO) requires that any trade advantage – such as a reduction in customs tariffs – granted by one member is automatically applied to all the others.

Moscow, which joined the WTO in 2012, has since benefited from this regime.

Concretely, depriving Russia of this status would allow its trading partners to impose higher customs tariffs on it, so as to penalize Russian exports.

30 billion

Last year, the United States imported some $30 billion worth of Russian products - including $17.5 billion worth of crude oil, a commodity on which Washington has just imposed an outright embargo.

This new sanction will be added to several bursts of Western measures intended to gradually cut the economic and financial ties of the country led by Vladimir Putin with the rest of the world.

These sanctions have already had a devastating impact on the Russian economy, to the point that the country is now, according to the Fitch agency, threatened with default.

The ruble is breaking records of weakness while many Western companies have suspended their activities in the country.

The war in Ukraine also has consequences for the entire world economy, which is barely recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic, due in particular to the explosion in the price of raw materials.

Joe Biden, who has stacked sanctions, is under intense domestic political pressure to do more.

It is in this context, for example, that he decided to ban imports of Russian oil into the United States, a measure demanded of him by Congress and which, for the first time, was taken without coordination with the Europeans.

The pressure also comes from Ukraine, which urges Washington to hit Russia harder in the wallet, failing to intervene militarily, which Joe Biden has categorically excluded.

"I know that the United States is doing everything it can for the moment but (...) we really want to see a lot more measures being introduced," said Oleg Ustenko, the Ukrainian president's economic adviser, on Friday. at CNN.

© 2022 AFP