Russia Claims Longer List Of U.S. Personae Non Gratae

Wall Street Journal

Russia vowed that its tally of undesirable Americans will be longer than the corresponding list of Russians whose travel was restricted by Washington after a investment fund’s lawyer died of untreated illnesses in a Moscow jail.

“Our list will be longer,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told local newswires Tuesday, later admitting that “the names won’t be disclosed.”

Moscow last week confirmed it had put U.S. officials on a visa blacklist, a move that coincided with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to former Soviet republics in central Asia. The U.S. State Department in July had announced its own restrictions, imposed as the Senate was considering not only a travel ban, but also the freezing of U.S. assets linked to 60 officials involved in a case that led to the death of 37-year-old Sergei Magnitsky.

The Russian officials on Senator Benjamin Cardin’s list, which doesn’t necessarily correspond to the State Department’s list, include judges, prosecutors, prison workers and other officials from the Interior Ministry and the Federal Security Service, the successor to the Soviet-era KGB.

For its part, the Russian Foreign Ministry has indicated it may ban travel to Russia for Americans suspected of “wrongful acts against Russian nationals in the U.S.” or linked to what it called the murder of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan and the detention of prisoners in Guantanamo.

Mr. Magnitsky died in 2009 after testifying in court that senior police officials took documents from an international investment fund, then used them to defraud the Russian government of tens of millions of dollars in tax refunds. Russian investigators said Mr. Magnitsky died of heart disease and hepatitis, and they recently opened probes into a doctor and prison official. Russia’s Foreign Ministry says the U.S. is “well aware of efforts by the Russian authorities to investigate” the lawyer’s death.

Although the Moscow-Washington spat could hurt President Barack Obama’s goal of “resetting” relations with Russia, the reciprocal travel bans, no matter how extensive they turn out to be, are unlikely to dent the tourism industry deeply in the two countries.

The U.S. Department of Commerce expects only 208,000 Russian travelers to visit the U.S. this year, about the same number expected from Ecuador. Meanwhile, Russia reported only 262,000 trips from U.S. citizens last year, about a third as many as from China or Lithuania. займ онлайн займы онлайн на карту срочно female wrestling https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-in-america.php www.zp-pdl.com займ на карту срочно без отказа