Washington has to understand that any attack on Russia would be met with a forceful retaliation, the ministry said in a statement. Whether we are discussing harsher penalties or unfair measures to impede our citizens’ professional activity, the idea of inevitable punishment will be constantly implemented.
The Russian government has rejected the embassy’s request for a consular visit to Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal correspondent accused of espionage, as retaliation for the US embassy in Moscow denying visas to Russian journalists, preventing them from accompanying Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to the UN Security Council last month.
Along with Obama, other people on the Russian blacklist are numerous members of Congress, governors and attorneys general of several US states, former government officials who are currently on the boards of well-known think tanks, businesspeople who provide weapons to Ukraine, and even the briefly appointed “disinformation czar” Nina Jankowicz.
The list also includes “those in government and law enforcement agencies who are directly involved in the persecution of dissidents in the wake of the so-called Capitol insurrection,” the Russian Foreign Ministry underlined.
The District of Columbia’s US Attorney Matthew Graves, his predecessor Michael Sherwin, Attorney General Karl Racine, and Michael Byrd, the Capitol Police officer who fatally shot unarmed demonstrator Ashli Babbitt, are notable examples in this category.
Geoffrey Pyatt, the assistant secretary of state for energy resources, and James Rubin, the former State Department spokesman and current director of the Global Engagement Centre, are among the prominent Biden administration officials who were placed on the blacklist. President Joe Biden’s senior advisor Anita Dunn is also listed.
Along with former NBC presenter Brian Williams, TV hosts Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, Rachel Maddow, and Joe Scarborough were all sanctioned.
Christine Wormuth and Frank Kendall, the Secretaries of the Army and the Air Force, as well as General Charles Q. Brown Jr., the Chief of Staff of the USAF, were also included on the list.
However, the majority of the list was made up of think tanks and the military-industrial complex. James Mattis, a retired Marine general and former secretary of defence, and George Tenet, a former director of the CIA, were both censured for serving on the boards of General Dynamics and an agency contractor, respectively. In-Q-Tel.
John Tefft, a former US ambassador to Russia, was forbidden from working as a senior scholar at RAND. Norm Eisen and Nelson Strobridge “Strobe” Talbot III, both former employees of the State Department, received punishment for their connections to the Brookings Institute. Eric Ciaramella, a senior researcher on Russia and Eurasia at the Carnegie Foundation, was one of the numerous people named on the sanctions list, which also included a large number of people from the Atlantic Council and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies think tanks.
Former Ukrainian finance minister Natalie Jaresko and former National Security Council analyst Fiona Hill were other well-known individuals on the Russian blacklist.
