“Firtash may know whether Ukrainian officials and managers of Gazprom and Gazprombank had personal economic interests in these transactions,” former Gazprom Deputy Chairman Alexander Ryazanov said in an interview in Moscow.

Gazprom’s spokesman, Sergei Kupriyanov, said the company sees no negative consequences from the possible extradition of Firtash to the U.S.

For years, Gazprom sold gas to Ukraine at lower than western European rates as a gesture of goodwill to Russia’s fellow former Soviet state. The RosUkrEnergo deals allowed the company to sell cheap gas from Turkmenistan at much higher rates in Europe, which helped subsidize Ukraine’s domestic market. Gazprom investors criticized the scheme at the time for introducing an unnecessary player in transactions that the Russian monopoly could perform itself.

‘Personal Bank’

The twin pillars of Putin’s economy, Gazprom, the world’s largest gas producer, and state oil champion OAO Rosneft, are already both potential targets of sanctions. Gazprom Chief Executive Officer Alexey Miller and Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin may be among officials banned from the European Union, Germany’s Bild newspaper reported March 15, a move the bloc has yet to carry out in two rounds of sanctions.

Obama signed a separate order on March 20 authorizing potential penalties on Russian industries such as energy, finance, mining and defense. Bank Rossiya, a St. Petersburg lender founded by three Putin associates in 1990, was put on the sanctions list last for being, as the Treasury Department said, “the personal bank for senior officials.”

Leaders of the U.S., the European Union, China, Japan and others meet in The Hague today, with Obama seeking to mobilize opposition to Putin’s incursion into Crimea.

Russian anti-corruption activist and opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who’s under house arrest in Moscow, said March 20 that Miller and Sechin, as longtime Putin allies with key positions in his power structure, should be included in any regime of penalties put together by the West.

‘Loyal Elite’

“Western nations could deliver a serious blow to the luxurious lifestyle enjoyed by the Kremlin’s cronies who shuttle between Russia and the West,” Navalny said in a commentary in the New York Times. “This means freezing the oligarchs’ financial assets and seizing their property.”