In a Thursday phone call, President Biden threatened additional sanctions against Russia over threats against the Ukraine. Putin reportedly responded by claiming such sanctions would be a “colossal mistake” the BBC reports.

In a recent report on countering international corruption, the Biden administration addressed the problem of corrupt individuals who take advantage of lax financial rules to promote anti-Democratic propaganda in other countries. Biden has an opportunity to use the conflict in the Ukraine to justify a massive crack-down on money flows from Russian oligarchs to their Republican Party minions in the United States, and then leverage those findings to justify a complete dismantling of the State Policy Network, a collection of GOP activist groups that includes organizations such as FreedomWorks, the National Rifle Association, and the Federalist Society.

Russia has repeatedly claimed that troops are only in the Ukraine for “training exercises“, but international observers are critical of those claims. “Moscow has repeatedly denied that it is planning any action against Ukraine. At the same time, President Vladimir Putin has said that he sees the continued expansion of the Western military bloc eastward as a threat. Last month, Russia proposed to both the US and NATO treaties that would ban the movement of Western military infrastructure closer to its borders and effectively bar Ukraine from joining the organization,” Kremlin propaganda outlet RT.com reports.

If the Biden Administration chooses to follow a path of “quiet aggression”, the ideal path forward may be to impose sanctions against Russia that include provisions for aggressive tracking of international money flows, use the provisions included in those sanctions to crack down on Russian Oligarchs giving money to conservative activist groups in the US, follow the money all the way to the offices of the Republican National Committee and the State Policy Network, and then begin arresting those individuals who are funneling Kremlin funds into political efforts within the United States.