MOSCOW: Moscow said yesterday that Washington had dealt a severe blow to relations by barring 18 Russians from the United States over alleged human rights abuses, and in retaliation it banned 18 Americans from entering Russia.
US President Barack Obama’s administration had on Friday issued a list of 18 people subject to visa bans and asset freezes in the United States under the Magnitsky Act legislation passed by Congress late last year.
“Under pressure from Russophobic members of the US Congress, a powerful blow has been dealt to bilateral relations and mutual trust,” a Russian Foreign Ministry statement said.
The mutual blacklisting could dim hopes voiced publicly by both sides of rehabilitating a relationship increasingly strained since President Vladimir Putin returned to the Kremlin last May.
Obama’s national security adviser is to have talks tomorrow with senior officials in Moscow — the highest-level face-to-face contact since the US president began a second term in January .
The Foreign Ministry listed 18 Americans subject to visa bans and asset freezes under a retaliatory law Putin signed in December that allowed such steps against Americans deemed to have violated the human rights of Russians abroad. That law also banned the adoption of Russian children by Americans.
The Americans barred from Russia include two officials from President George W Bush’s administration who the ministry said were linked to the “legalisation and application of torture” — David Addington, a former chief of staff of Vice President Dick Cheney, and John Choon Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer.
The list includes two ex-commanders of the US military detention centres at the Guantanamo Bay US Naval Base, whose detainees have included Russian citizens.
As counsel to Cheney, Addington pressed for more coercive interrogation tactics while Yoo issued a legal opinion that said federal laws on the use of torture did not apply to interrogations conducted overseas.
Geoffrey Miller, a commander at Guantanamo in the Bush era, was sent to Iraq to advise on interrogation tactics and was an adviser on interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison. Jeffrey Harbeson was a Guantanamo commander during Obama’s first term.
The list includes law enforcement authorities involved in the prosecution of Viktor Bout, a Russian arms trader serving a 25-year US prison term after his arrest in Thailand, and of Konstantin Yaroshenko, who was detained in Liberia and sentenced to 20 years on drug-trafficking charges in the United States.
“The war of lists is not our choice, but we have no right not to respond to blatant blackmail,” the ministry statement said. “It is high time for politicians in Washington to finally realise that it is futile to build relations with a country like Russia in a spirit of mentoring and outright diktat.”
REUTERS
