Moscow’s Sanctions Tit-for-Tat Threatens to Kill the “Reset”

Ariel Cohen / Robert Nicholson / August 01, 2011

This week the State Department has placed some 64 Russian officials on a visa blacklist that would prevent them from entering the United States. These Russian prosecutors and policemen all played a role in the death of the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, the most famous whistleblower in post–communist Russian history. While the Foreign Ministry in Moscow loudly protested that the U.S. is being tough on Russia, the imposition of sanctions looks more like the State Department’s pre-emptive way to prevent the Senate’s Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2011 (S. 1039) from passage.

Russia has threatened to “respond asymmetrically” against the Obama Administration’s “reset” policy if the bill becomes law. In a tit-for-tat, the Russian Foreign Ministry reportedly is drawing up a list of U.S. officials who will be banned from Russia and prevented from banking there. While this may be of little concern to Washington, Russian threats to curb cooperation on Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, and North Korea are taken more seriously. (more…)