© Reuters / Evgenina Novozhenina / Jonathan Drake / Gary Cameron
Among the list of US figures blocked from entering Russia from Friday are FBI Director Christopher Wray, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Nicholas Mayorkas, Attorney General Merrick Garland, Domestic Policy Advisor Susan Rice, and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.
Others blocked from the country include Director of Federal Bureau of Prisons Michael Carvajal, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, and former CIA Director James Woolsey.
The latest round of retaliatory sanctions began on March 2, when the US Office of Foreign Assets Control joined the US Departments of State and Commerce to hit Moscow with a grand gesture presented as a "response to Russia's poisoning and subsequent imprisonment of Russian opposition figure Aleksey Navalny."
No convincing evidence has been presented that Navalny was poisoned with the lethal Novichok agent in August or that the Russian government was involved. The opposition figure recovered quickly enough to come up with and produce a film accusing President Vladimir Putin of owning a luxurious "palace" in the southern Krasnodar Region - a property Russian construction mogul Arkady Rotenberg later said he was the real "beneficiary" of.
Some of the materials shown in the film required Navalny or his team to have worked with the archives of the East German Stasi secret service - a fact that prompted some Russian officials to accuse Berlin of cooperating with the opposition figure. Navalny was treated in Berlin's Charité hospital, but apparently chose to stay in Germany well after leaving the hospital. As a result, a Moscow court ruled that he effectively violated the terms of a suspended sentence he had been handed as part of an embezzlement case in 2014. Navalny was sentenced to a two-and-a-half-year prison term in Moscow in February.
Washington has demanded the immediate release of Navalny, who was also found guilty of defaming a World War II veteran and ordered to pay a $11,500 fine. The United States and its allies rushed to declare the sentencing "political."
The US has repeatedly tried to justify its insistence that only Russia could have poisoned Navalny with Novichok - a poison that has become a household name in the West ever since the Skripal affair in 2018 - by insisting only Russia had possession of the Soviet-era nerve agent. However, the agent was produced in several other countries too. In 2018, former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter were supposedly poisoned with the substance, only to survive and regain their health, despite the poison's lethal reputation.
The US sanctioned seven Russian government officials on March 2, following the EU's reasoning that the Novichok chemical could only have been administered by Russia's security service, the FSB, as no other countries had access to its production. The Kremlin has denied having anything to do with the poisoning.
US warns it reserves right to retaliate after Russia's tit-for-tat response to Biden's sanctions
"Our recent actions were proportionate and appropriate to Russia's harmful activities. Today's announcement by the Russian government was escalatory and regrettable," a State Department spokesman said in a statement on Friday evening. "It is not in our interest to get into an escalatory cycle, but we reserve the right to respond to any Russian retaliation against the United States."
Foggy Bottom was responding to the announcement that Moscow will expel 10 US diplomats, restricting the number of short-term visas for State Department staff to 10 per year, and ban the US embassy from hiring citizens of Russia and third countries as administrative staff.
The "open ground" memorandum of 1992, allowing US diplomats to move freely around Russia, has also been "declared invalid due to systematic violations" by Americans, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
There are also plans to "halt the activities... of American foundations and NGOs controlled by the Department of State and other US government agencies" since the US "shows no intention of scaling back its systematic subversive efforts."
These measures were a response to President Joe Biden's executive orders sanctioning 30 Russian individuals and entities for allegedly interfering in the 2020 US presidential election and alleged involvement in the SolarWinds hack - both of which Russia has vehemently denied. Biden also expelled 10 Russian diplomats and banned US companies from trading in Russian sovereign debt.
Russia also chose to respond to Biden's March 2 decision to sanction several Russian officials accused - with no evidence provided - of involvement in the alleged "poisoning" of opposition blogger Alexey Navalny. On Friday, Moscow banned eight current and former US officials from entering Russia.
The ban applies to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Attorney General Merrick Garland, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, Director of Federal Bureau of Prisons Michael Carvajal, and President Joe Biden's domestic policy adviser Susan Rice. Former national security adviser John Bolton made the Russian blacklist as well. As did James Woolsey, who ran the CIA between 1993 and 1995 - and recently authored a book 'Operation Dragon: Inside the Kremlin's Secret War on America', which accused the Soviet Union of assassinating US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1963.
The unusual step to publicize the response was taken "in view of the unprecedented complications in Russia-US relations provoked by Washington," the Foreign Ministry said.
US sanctions and messages from Washington "show that Washington is not willing to listen and does not appreciate the restraint that we have displayed despite the tensions that have been purposefully fueled" by Washington since the Obama administration, said the Foreign Ministry.
"There must be no doubt - not a single round of sanctions will go unanswered."
Russia would "like to avoid further escalation" with the US but can't do so while Washington says one thing and does another.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters on Friday that Russia could have inflicted "painful measures" on US businesses, but chose not to do so - at this time.
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