WEB DESK
Russia has condemned the United State’s new economic sanctions against Moscow, labelling them “absurd” and reserving the right to a “response”.
The decision to expand sanctions on Moscow, made by the US Department of the Treasury, is a destructive step, which will not go unanswered, Chairman of the Russian State Duma (lower house of parliament) Committee on Foreign Affairs Leonid Slutsky told journalists.
“New US sanctions are a destructive step, which exacerbates relations between Russia and the United States,” he noted. “It is clear that Washington seeks to achieve its own political goals through unfair competition on global markets,” Slutsky added.
The fresh sanctions, which were announced by the US Treasury yesterday, target Russian officials who supplied turbines to a power plant in annexed Crimea, as well as several “ministers” from the breakaway region in eastern Ukraine.
A total of 21 people and nine companies were hit with the sanctions, some of them over the turbines, which were built by German engineering giant Siemens for delivery to Russia but were later sent on to Crimea — which Russia seized from Ukraine and annexed in 2014.
Moscow said the new sanctions were imposed “under the pretext of inventing Russia’s involvement in the Ukrainian crisis”, adding that the US is merely “showing the whole world its own powerlessness”.
United States hit 21 people and nine companies linked to the Russia-backed conflict in eastern Ukraine with new economic sanctions, the latest effort by Washington to put pressure on groups most actively involved in the nearly 4-year-old conflict.
The measures announced on January 26 by the Treasury Department came on the same day that U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Davos, Switzerland.
They also came as the U.S. special envoy for the Ukrainian conflict, Kurt Volker, met with his Kremlin counterpart, Vladislav Surkov, to discuss ways to resolve the fighting.
Since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula and the outbreak of fighting in eastern Ukraine, the United States and the European Union have imposed asset freezes, travel bans, and related financial restrictions on a number of Russian people and companies, as well as separatist leaders in the region.