“As we usually do in such situations, we will follow the principle of mutuality. There are no problems in selecting the candidates banned to enter Russia. We have enough of them in Lithuania at the moment,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a response to BNS.
The Russian ministry said that the Lithuanian decision to draw up the list was “yet another confirmation of the Vilnius efforts to demonstrate its hostility towards Russia at any cost.”
Lithuania’s Interior Minister Eimutis Misiūnas compiled the list in accordance to the Magnitsky Act enforced earlier in January.
The law, which was passed by the Seimas last November and came into effect on Jan. 1, 2018, was named after Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky who died in a Russian prison in 2009 after uncovering a 230-million-US-dollar tax fraud scheme.
Magnitsky’s supporters blame Russia’s authorities for the lawyer’s death, saying that he was unjustly imprisoned and did not receive appropriate medical care for 358 days until his death. The Kremlin denies the allegations.
Published by Lithuania on Monday, the list includes Chechnya’s leader Ramzan Kadyrov, Alexander Bastrykin, the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, Oleg Logunov, deputy head of the Interior Ministry’s Investigative Committee who oversaw the Magnitsky case, and judges Yelena Stashina, Aleksey Krivoruchko, Svetlana Ukhnalyova and Sergei Podoprigorov, as well as the heads of the Moscow tax authority, various civil servants and other persons.
The United States, Canada, Britain and Estonia also have similar Magnitsky Acts.