Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

Kremlin Brutality Reined In by Magnitsky Act

NewsMax

The deadly Ebola epidemic and the growing menace of ISIS militants in the Middle East have swept the crisis in Ukraine off the front pages.

But renewed calls for assistance to the Kiev government of President Petro Poroshenko are sure to be heard when Congress returns for a lame duck session following the November elections.

Many Republican lawmakers are already calling for a Lend-Lease-style form of assistance to Ukraine akin to that which the U.S. provided the United Kingdom and China before America itself entered World War II.

Other members of Congress are expected to call for even tougher sanctions against the Putin regime in Moscow. Rep. Robert Pittenger, R.-N.C., chairman of House Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, has even called for sanctions that “will get Mr. Putin’s colleagues in the Kremlin upset enough to convince him to change his policies, or failing that, to depose him.”

But the sanctions that hit hardest at the Kremlin are already on the books in the U.S. in the form of the Magnitsky Act. Enacted by Congress in 2013 with 84 percent of the votes in the House of Representatives and 92 percent of the Senate, and signed into law by President Obama, the Magnitsky Act specifically targets the assets within and visits to the U.S. by key people in and around the Kremlin.

The reason for imposing these sanctions is the fate of the valiant Russian for whom they are named: Sergei Magnitsky, a tax lawyer in Moscow who concluded in 2008 that the government short-changed a private corporation $5.4 billion rubles (roughly $230 million) that he charged went instead to corrupt officials.