The Biden administration plans to spare everyday Russians from the brunt of US export controls if Russia invades Ukraine, and focus on targeting industrial sectors, a White House official said.

“Key people” will also face “massive sanctions”, a top commerce official said in a separate speech on Friday.

The comments narrow the scope of potential curbs on imports to Russia that had previously been described as disrupting Russia’s economy more broadly, hitting industrial sectors and consumer technologies like smartphones.

“We can’t preview every action, but the intent there really is to have measures that we think will degrade Russia’s industrial capabilities and industrial production capacity over time, not to go after individual, everyday Russian consumers,” White House national security official Peter Harrell said in a virtual speech for the Massachusetts Export Center on Thursday that received little media coverage.

Harrell, who sits on the National Security Council, said the US was prepared, immediately after an invasion of Ukraine, to impose “crippling financial costs on major Russian financial institutions as well as to impose a range of quite sweeping export controls that will degrade Russian industrial capacity over the mid- and long term”.