US announces new Russian sanctions

The United States has blacklisted Russian President Vladimir Putin's reputed top enforcer as part of new sanctions.

File image of Russian President Vladimir Putin

File image of Russian President Vladimir Putin Source: AAP

The US is economically blacklisting five more Russians, including a senior law enforcement official in President Vladimir Putin's government.

Under the sanctions, their assets are blocked and people in the United States are generally prohibited from dealing with them.

The new sanctions come three days after the US released an unclassified intelligence assessment connecting Putin to the hacking of Democratic accounts in an effort to interfere with the 2016 election.

Officials say the sanctions are unrelated to the hacking and are instead connected to a 2012 US law to punish Russian human rights violators.

The most prominent individual targeted by the US is Alexander Bastrykin, the head of Russia's main investigative agency.

Also sanctioned were Gennady Plaksin and Stanislav Gordiyevsky, a state investigator, both tied to Sergei Magnitsky, an anti-corruption lawyer who died in 2009 after a year in a Russian jail.

The Magnitsky Act bars Russians believed to have been involved in his death or other severe human rights abuses from entering the United States, and freezes their assets there.

Also blacklisted were Andrei Lugovoy, a Russian lawmaker, and Dmitry Kovtun, both leading suspects in the murder of Russian spy and Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.

Litvinenko fled Russia for Britain, where he was poisoned after drinking green tea laced with a rare but potent radioactive isotope at a London Hotel.

The inquiry found Lugovoy and Kovtun carried out the killing as part of an operation directed by the Russian Federal Security Service. Efforts to extradite both suspects to Britain have failed.


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Published 10 January 2017 8:06pm
Source: AAP


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