Russia said Saturday that it has so far banned 963 Americans from entering the country – including President Joe Biden and other senior officials who were previously sanctioned.
Symbolic travel bans are largely part of Russia’s deteriorating relations with the West since its February 24 invasion of Ukraine, which prompted Washington and its allies to impose drastic sanctions on Moscow and increase arms supplies to Ukraine.
Separately, the foreign ministry said it had added 26 new names to a list of Canadians banned from traveling to Russia, including defense and defense chiefs and Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, the wife of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Trudeau himself received a symbolic “black stamp” earlier.
Biden and members of his administration were sanctioned back in March, but now the Russian Foreign Ministry has published a full list of all US citizens banned from entering the federation. The accompanying declaration said that “the hostile actions taken by Washington, which are a boomerang against the United States itself, will continue to receive appropriate resistance.”
The Russian ministry says the counter-sanctions are aimed at “forcing the US ruling regime, which is trying to impose a neocolonial” rule-based world order “on the rest of the world, to change its behavior in recognition of new geopolitical realities.”
Earlier names on the huge list included Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and CIA chief William Burns.
The publication of the Russian sanctions list against the United States coincided with President Joe Biden’s signing of a law to provide $ 33 billion in aid to Ukraine, including $ 20 billion for arms purchases.
The addition to the Canadian list comes four days after the Ottawa government introduced a bill that would ban President Vladimir Putin and about 1,000 members of his government and military from entering Canada.
