Summary:
New sanctions are now inevitable. Russia almost certainly faces new, and possibly damaging, sanctions from the US in early 2Q21. This is because of the allegation that Russia is behind the SolarWinds hacking. The existence of a “smoking-gun” is hardly relevant as it is almost entirely accepted that Russia’s SVR agency is behind the hacking and, as such, it must have been approved at the very top of the Kremlin Administration.