Daleep Singh, Sanctions Architect

Daleep Singh helped turn Russia into the most sanctioned nation on Earth. Among the biggest penalties: denying major Russian banks access to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), the system institutions use to talk to one another. The move made it almost impossible for Vladimir Putin to shift around money to finance the war, squeezed billionaire oligarchs close to the president and temporarily shuttered Russian markets. As a whole, the sanctions led to a 30% drop in the value of the ruble, forcing Russia to raise interest rates and impose capital controls to stanch an outflow of cash that threatened to collapse its economy. The moves also put out of reach stockpiles of foreign currency and gold that Putin had planned to use to pay for his war, leaving his army with dwindling supplies and technology.

Prior to his role as a security adviser, Singh worked at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and in the Obama administration as an expert on international affairs and domestic policy. He left the government in April and is now overseeing research at PGIM Fixed Income, which has $759 billion in assets under management.