[ad_1]
Russia imposed sanctions on other representatives of the German government on Tuesday. In response to sanctions imposed by the European Union (EU) in October, Moscow decided to expand the list of German citizens “who are prohibited from entering Russian territory,” the foreign ministry in Moscow said without naming them.
In October 2015, the EU imposed sanctions on Russian intelligence officers and a unit of the GRU military intelligence service for hacking attacks on the German Bundestag. The sanctions affect, among others, the first deputy head of the presidential administration, Sergei Kirijenko, the head of national intelligence Alexander Bortnikow and two deputy defense ministers. Punitive measures by the EU include entry bans and asset freezes.
EU sanctions in response to a cyber attack
In the Bundestag, the attack in April and May 2015 completely paralyzed the IT infrastructure. To stop it, the entire parliament had to be offline for days. According to the EU, a large amount of data was stolen during the cyberattack. The email accounts of several MPs and that of Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) were also affected.
Merkel publicly blamed Russian intelligence services for the piracy attack on the Bundestag in May.
The sanctions from the Russian side are not the only recent ones. Last week, the Russian Foreign Ministry imposed counter-sanctions in response to new EU sanctions. The EU had imposed the measures after the poison attack on Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny. The Russian Foreign Ministry considers the sanctions unacceptable and illegal. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced his own punitive measures in November.
Navalny is said to have been poisoned in August with a chemical nerve agent developed by the Novitschok group in the Soviet Union. Laboratories in Germany, France, and Sweden later found war agent Novichok on his body. Russia initially imposed sanctions on various representatives of these three countries last week.
The Russian sanctions affected, among other things, the management of the Bundeswehr laboratory, which had detected the poisoning of Novitschok de Navalny.
