RUSSIAN president Vladimir Putin has called a long-awaited US list of Russian businessmen and officials who have flourished under his presidency a “hostile step” that harms relations between Moscow and Washington.
The Trump administration’s so-called Putin List featured 114 Russian politicians and 96 “oligarchs”, fulfilling a demand by Congress that the US should punish Moscow for interfering in the 2016 US election.
The section on political leaders includes the entire Kremlin administration and the cabinet, as well as other top officials.
Speaking in Moscow, Putin, who is running for president at the March election, joked that he felt “slighted” that he himself was not on the list.
Despite calling it a “hostile step”, Putin said Moscow does not want to make the situation worse, and is eager to “develop the relations as much as our American counterparts are willing to”.
The list had led to fears among rich Russians that it could lead to US sanctions, or being informally blacklisted in the global financial system.
However, the US surprised observers by announcing that it had decided not to punish anyone under the new sanctions, at least for now. Some US representatives have accused President Donald Trump of giving Russia a free pass, fuelling further questions about whether the president is unwilling to confront Moscow.
Russia hawks in Congress had pushed the administration to include certain names, while Russian businessmen hired lobbyists to keep them off.
The list includes the whole of Putin’s administration, plus the Russian cabinet, all top law enforcement officials and chief executives of the main state-controlled companies.
A companion list of 96 “oligarchs” is a carbon copy of the Forbes magazine’s Russian billionaires’ rankings, only arranged alphabetically. It makes no distinction between those who are tied to the Kremlin and those who are not. Some of the people on the list have long fallen out with the Kremlin or are widely considered to have built their fortunes independently of the Russian government.
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