The sanctions imposed on Russia by President Joe Biden after Moscow sent soldiers into Ukraine's separatist regions were harshly criticized as a weak response and were shrugged off by the markets, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.

The sanctions — which targeted a pair of Russian banks and three members of the country's elite, as well as seeking to freeze future purchases of Russian sovereign debt — were a far cry from the precedent-shattering, economy-crippling measures the United States and its partners long vowed to enact if Russian troops invaded.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., slammed the sanctions as "woefully inadequate" and warned that Biden isn't seizing the moment at a critical point in history, The Post and Courier reported.

Graham added that he rejected the idea of bipartisanship so long as the Democrat administration's approach remains one of appeasement, saying "in the '30s, you had plenty of unity and it was all wrong."

But it was not only Republicans who called for harsher action against Russia, as Sen. Bob Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, told CNN that "I don't know what we need to wait for" regarding the imposition of harsher measures against Moscow.

"What we can't have here is another Munich moment," Menendez said in referring to the 1938 agreement that allowed Nazi Germany to take over part of Czechoslovakia, stressing that "the West has to decide whether it's going to allow more and more European land to be taken over by force or whether we are going to stand up to Putin."

White House officials defended the measured approach, with Daleep Singh, the deputy national security adviser for international economics, telling reporters in Washington that "this was the beginning of an invasion, and this is the beginning of our response," according to Bloomberg.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki insisted that "President Biden has rallied the world, rallied Europe, to stand up to the actions of President Putin".

But Brian O'Toole, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who previously worked in the U.S. Treasury Department's sanctions unit, said "we must wait to see if the U.S. will impose the impact they've promised for further aggression and how that is defined," emphasizing that he fears "at the moment that Putin may not think the West has the stomach to follow through."

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