In the greenroom of a television studio last week, Vladimir Churov, Russia's top elections official and an old friend of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, told me about his vacation in the U.S. a few years back. His fondest memory was a jaunt he took to El Paso, Texas, where he walked across the border into Mexico. Coming back, he says, a U.S. border guard gave him a pleasant welcome, while some of the darker-skinned travelers were held back and searched. "It was the first time in my life I really felt like a white man," Churov beamed. But the smile soon faded from his face. No more U.S. border guards would be letting him pass, he told me, because he is on a State Department blacklist. "We're all on there," he said, "even Putin."
This, of course, wasn't true. Putin has not been banned from traveling to the U.S. and neither has Churov. But his belief in the blacklist is not just paranoia — it is a sign of the times. In July, the U.S. tried out a new diplomatic weapon against Russia that has since upended their relationship. It put together a list of about 60 unnamed Russian officials linked to a specific rights violation — the jailing and death of an anticorruption crusader named Sergei Magnitsky — and it banned those officials from traveling to the U.S. On Saturday came Russia's tit-for-tat response. In a statement, the Foreign Ministry said it has banned a group of American officials from entering Russia because of their alleged involvement in "high-profile crimes." The list, it warned, would be expanded if the U.S. "went the road of a visa confrontation."
The disturbing thing about the Russian ban is its potential scope, which is far broader than the U.S. blacklist. According to the Foreign Ministry's statement, it is meant as retribution for a laundry list of crimes, including the death of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the "torture and humiliation" of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, and the "kidnapping and humiliation" of Russians standing trial in the U.S. So in theory, the Russian ban could apply to a huge cross section of the Washington establishment. That is supposed to be the crafty part. Both in the Russian and American cases, the names on the list are not disclosed. "You can imagine what this does to someone psychologically," a senior Western diplomat explained to me recently. "They think, 'Well, I wasn't involved in Magnitsky's death. But I was at a meeting once where it was discussed. So could I be on the list too?'" Nobody knows. And the only way to find out is by applying for a visa.
It is a clever tactic, but it seems to have encouraged the Russian government to close ranks around its own. Churov, having finished his El Paso story in the greenroom, proceeded to tape a talk show that evening in which the blacklist came up again. His response was a minor tantrum. "I think that including me on such lists is a great honor," Churov said. "It shows the stupidity of those who compile such lists." The only way he would now agree to travel to the U.S. would be if Senator Benjamin Cardin, the Maryland Democrat who drafted the blacklist, sends him a personal invitation. "I will not consider an invitation from any other government body," Churov said.
On Friday night, when I reached Cardin for a response, he said he found the outburst "puzzling." The American blacklist only includes three very specific groups of officials: those who were involved in the $230 million tax fraud that Magnitsky uncovered in 2009, those who put him in jail and kept him there without trial, and those who refused to give him medical treatment, which led to his excruciating death in a prison cell. Cardin said that election officials like Churov obviously had nothing to do with that, and neither did Putin.
But Churov's remarks suggest that many in Russia's political elite feel slighted by the American blacklist. His response is to treat the blacklist as "some badge of honor instead of a badge of shame," Cardin says. "He is trying, in a way, to give credibility to those who violated basic human rights."
That is not the effect the U.S. had intended. The goal of the list was to push the Russian government to seek justice for Magnitsky's death, and amid the foreign pressure, numerous investigations have indeed been opened. About two dozen officials linked to the Magnitsky case have already been fired, and various criminal probes are ongoing. But this has not satisfied the U.S. lawmakers. In their view, the Russian response has been too slow and too lenient, and the people facing charges in Russia, including two prison doctors, are only scapegoats meant to let their bosses off the hook.
"To me it's similar to some of the international efforts to hold people criminally responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity," Cardin told me. "These are cases when there is an ineffective internal operation to deal with it. So you have to look at international ways, to make it clear that that kind of conduct will be not tolerated by the international community."
To this end, the Canadian and the European parliaments have followed the U.S. example, voting to ban dozens of officials implicated in the Magnitsky case. Some of their foreign bank accounts have also been frozen, and Cardin has pushed for their parents, children and spouses to be banned as well. For the Russians, that has started to feel like a diplomatic lynching, which they say violates the presumption of innocence. "They are trying to decide for us who is guilty," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday. "Unfortunately, there are rules in this genre," he added. "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth."