US and others kick Russia out of G-8

The United States and its closest allies on Monday cast Russia out of the Group of Eight industrialized nations to punish President Vladimir Putin for his lightning annexation of Crimea, while threatening tougher sanctions if he escalates aggression against Ukraine.

President Barack Obama and the leaders of Canada, Japan and Europe’s four strongest economies gathered for the first time since the Ukraine crisis erupted last month. They used a closed two-hour meeting on the sidelines of a summit about nuclear security to project a united front against Moscow.

But they stopped short, at least for now, of imposing sanctions against what a senior Obama administration official called vital sectors of the Russian economy: energy, banking and finance, engineering and the arms industry. Only further aggression by Putin — like rolling his forces into the Ukrainian mainland — would prompt much harsher punishment, the countries indicated in their joint statement, called The Hague Declaration.

“The biggest hammer that can drop is sectoral sanctions, and the clearest trigger for those is eastern and southern Ukraine,” the senior administration official said.

Some critics of the administration said the suspension of Russia from the G-8, which administration officials acknowledged was largely symbolic, showed a lack of resolve among the allies to take tougher steps to undo Putin’s annexation of Crimea.

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