This is a little like taking coals to Newcastle. The U.S. Treasury Department announced on Monday that the “big bank” that would now be sanctioned under Bessent’s Operation Economic Outcast was Russia’s #2 bank, VTB, because it allegedly helped Tehran evade sanctions, in part by “establishing correspondent relationships with sanctioned Iranian banks.” But VTB is already heavily sanctioned by the U.S. According to some financial analysts, the real target here is China, because VTB is reportedly the only Russian bank with a branch in China.

“This is a China play,” Miad Maleki, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and former U.S. Treasury sanctions official, said in an X post, CNBC reported. What changes today: every Chinese bank touching VTB Shanghai now carries Iran-program secondary-sanctions exposure, inside an operation where Treasury is naming a bank a week,” Maleki wrote. “Beijing has shielded its big banks from the Russia fight. Shielding them from the Iran fight is a different calculation.”

How that is going to play in the upcoming Sept. 24 meeting between China’s Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump is another matter.