U.S. Sanctions Echo Through Russian Factory Towns

Company owned by billionaire freezes budget for communities; ‘The life of the city depends on that factory’

Thomas Grove | Photographs by

Max Avdeev for The Wall Street Journal

Updated July 2, 2018 6:00 a.m. ET

SAYANOGORSK, Russia—When the Trump administration blacklisted Russia’s biggest aluminum producer, United Co. Rusal, in April, it was among a blast of measures aimed at the country’s elite.

But the sanctions are already weighing on the residents of this Siberian factory town more than 2,000 miles east of Moscow, where Rusal and its smelter anchor the local economy.

The...