New US sanctions on Russia are “mostly symbolic” and will have minimal impact on markets and the macroeconomic outlook, economists have suggested, CNBC reported.

President Biden’s administration on Thursday announced a raft of new sanctions against Moscow. Sanctions targeted 16 entities and 16 individuals accused of attempting to influence the 2020 US presidential election, along with five individuals and three entities linked to the Crimea annexation, and expelled 10 Russian diplomats from the US.

However, economists do not foresee any tangible fallout from the sanctions in their current form.

“The latest round of U.S. sanctions was a mostly symbolic exercise,” Agathe Demarais, global forecasting director at The Economist Intelligence Unit, told CNBC on Friday.

Demarais added that the sanctions on sovereign debt are less stringent than the initial market reaction would suggest, since they only target the primary debt market and can therefore “easily be circumvented via the secondary market.”

Vladimir Tikhomirov, chief economist at Moscow-based BCS Global Markets, told CNBC on Friday that some investors were relieved by the removal of uncertainty and fairly modest sanctions, which reduced the overall level of Russia-related investment risks.

And Liam Peach, emerging markets economist at Capital Economics, agreed that the fallout will be limited unless the sanctions are extended to all sovereign debt, or Russia launches aggressive retaliation.