The United States has the ability to strangle Russia's banking system, but that nation has the means to respond with potent cyber warfare, says The Telegraph columnist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.

The United States' power is to accuse a bank of money laundering or underwriting terrorist activities, he says.

Once it does so, the bank "becomes radioactive, caught in the 'boa constrictor's lethal embrace,' as Juan Zarate, the Treasury and White House official who helped spearhead policy after 9/11, puts it," Evans-Pritchard writes.

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"This can be a death sentence even if the lender has no operations in the U.S."

But Russia is a potent foe, Ambrose-Pritchard warns. "President Putin knows exactly what the U.S. can do with its financial weapons," he argues.

"The greatest risk is surely an 'asymmetric' riposte by the Kremlin. Russia's cyber warfare experts are among the best."

It's not clear that the United States can fend off attacks on electricity grids, water systems, air traffic control or the New York Stock Exchange.

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned of a cyber-Pearl Harbor in 2012, Ambrose-Pritchard notes.

Meanwhile, two members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Sunday urged the West to ratchet up its sanctions against Russia to include its petrochemical and banking industries, The Associated Press reports.

The two are Sens. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Chris Murphy, D-Conn. "We've helped in many ways to create the problems that exist there. And to leave them alone in the manner that we're leaving them alone to me is just unconscionable," Corker tells NBC's "Meet the Press."

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