Russia was considering retaliation on Thursday for the United States imposing sanctions on the Kremlin-backed leader of southern Russia’s Chechnya region, Ramzan Kadyrov.
The Kremlin denounced the financial sanctions as an illegal action harming relations between the countries and said it was considering a reciprocal reaction, according to comments by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on state media.
Kadyrov, who has ruled the restive, predominantly Muslim region for a decade, was sanctioned on Wednesday by the US Treasury on allegations of human rights abuses as he “oversees an administration involved in disappearances and extra-judicial killings,” according to a statement.
Kadyrov, who has cultivated an image as an authoritarian strongman doing the Kremlin’s bidding, responded to the sanctions with a veiled threat that the US does not have to worry about him because he has not yet been ordered to go there.
Posing for a bench press with a fully loaded bar that he does not actually lift, Kadyrov made the threat in a video posted on his Instagram page.
“Poor Americans,” he said. “The small but proud Chechen Republic simply does not leave that entire state in peace.”
Sanctions were also implemented on another Chechen official connected with Kadyrov, as well as three other Russians implicated in a lucrative fraud scheme, as part of the 2012 Magnitsky Act, intended to hold non-US citizens liable for human rights abuses.
Dozens of people, mostly Russians, have been sanctioned under the law.
Relations between the US and Russia have in the last few years plummeted to their lowest point since the Cold War.
The US and other Western powers, including the European Union, have also sanctioned numerous Russian officials and businesses over Russia’s annexation of neighbouring Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014 and its continuing support for rebel groups waging war in Ukraine’s east.
Russia has retaliated against those sanctions with tit-for-tat measures and a broad ban on food product imports that has mostly affected EU member states.(dpa/NAN)
