MOSCOW, August 26. /TASS/. Russia will make a symmetrical response should Ukraine come up with a Sentsov-Savchenko "sanction list," the chairman of the State Duma’s committee for the CIS affairs, Eurasian integration and diaspora relations, Leonid Slutsky, has told TASS.
"A replica of the United States’ Magnitsky List in the context of mutual sanctions will aggravate our relations, which Kiev has been trying to systematically reduce to nothing on instructions from our strategic friends. I am certain that should any more sanction lists be drawn up in Ukraine, Russia will respond with counter-lists," Slutsky said.
Slutsky said he believes that the idea of a Sentsov-Savchenko list was prompted by foreign countries.
"External administration has pierced Ukraine’s entire system of state power and pushed international regulatory norms and law to the sidelines. While threatening us with more sanctions the Ukrainian foreign minister for some reason forgets that both Sentsov and Savchenko are charged with grave crimes in Russia - one with a terrorist conspiracy and the other, with complicity to murder," Slutsky said.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin on Tuesday called for introducing what he described as a "Sentsov-Savchenko" sanctions list.
"I believe that we are obliged to gradually get down to a discussion over a Sentsov-Savchenko list,’" Klimkin said on television. "There must be a specific sanctions list, identical to the one drawn up in the Magnitsky case. We will be working on it."
On August 25 a district court in the North Caucasus sentenced Ukrainian film director Oleg Sentsov to 20 years in a tight security prison for plotting terrorist attacks in Crimea. His accomplice Alexander Kolchenko was sentenced to ten years in a top security prison.
Nadezhda Savchenko has been in Russia under arrest since July 2014. She is accused of complicity in the murder of two Russian journalists, Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin in the Lugansk Region. She pleads innocence.