13th April, 2018
The Russian government will compile a list of U.S. nationals who will be forbidden to enter Russia, within the framework of a draft law on new sanctions, leader of the Russian LDPR party Vladimir Zhirinovsky said Friday.
“A list banning U.S. nationals’ entry into Russia will be introduced. Activities of U.S. nationals, even those who are high-class specialists, will be halted.
“All lists will be determined by the government,” Zhirinovsky told reporters.
On April 6, the Trump administration unleashed additional sanctions against seven Russian oligarchs with ties to President Vladimir Putin along with 12 companies they own or control.
The measures announced by the Treasury Department were also aimed at 17 senior Russian government officials and the state-owned Russian weapons trading company, Rosoboronexport, which has long-standing ties to Syria and its subsidiary, Russian Financial Corporation Bank.
The punitive actions are the latest escalating step by the U.S. to punish Putin’s inner circle for interfering
in the 2016 election and other ongoing aggressions across the globe in Crimea, Ukraine and Syria.
The White House said such targeted sanctions would help to ensure that Russian oligarchs profiting from the Kremlin’s destabilising activities, including its interference of Western democratic elections in 2016 and 2017, would face consequences for their actions.
“We cannot allow those seeking to sow confusion, discord, and rancor to be successful,” President Donald Trump
said in a statement released by the White House.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin cited Russia’s occupation in Crimea and its ongoing efforts to supply the Assad
regime in Syria with materials and weapons in a statement announcing the sanctions.
A senior administration official told reporters in a briefing the sanctions had been under review for some time but were not imposed solely in response to a single event.
Rather they were “in response to the totality of the Russian government’s ongoing and increasingly brazen pattern of malign activity around the world.”
The sanctions list targets a number of Russian tycoons, including Oleg Deripaska, a billionaire who once had close ties to Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort and Kirill Shamalov, an energy executive who married Putin’s daughter.
Others are Suleiman Kerimov, who allegedly brought millions of euros into France in suitcases.
The move comes after 60 American diplomats left Russia as part of tit-for-tat series of expulsions following the poisoning of a Russian spy and his daughter in Britain, allegedly at the hands of the Kremlin.
The U.S. joined more than 20 countries expelling more than 100 Russian diplomats and intelligence officers.