Tuesday 29 December 2020
Moscow imposes entry bans
Russia locks out more Germans
The EU imposes entry bans on Russian citizens because of a hacker attack on the German Bundestag. Moscow reciprocates in the same way. The list of German government representatives affected is getting longer and longer.
Russia has imposed sanctions on other German government representatives. In response to the sanctions imposed by the EU in October, Moscow decided to expand the list of German citizens "who are prohibited from entering Russian territory," said the Foreign Ministry in Moscow without naming them. In October 2015, the EU imposed sanctions on Russian intelligence officers and a unit of the military intelligence service GRU because of the hacker attack on the German Bundestag.
Among others, the head of the GRU military intelligence service, Igor Kostyukov, and the intelligence service officer and hacker Dmitri Badin were affected. They were banned from entering the country and their accounts were blocked.
In the Bundestag, the attack in April and May 2015 completely paralyzed the IT infrastructure. To stop it, the entire parliament had to be taken offline for days. According to the EU, a large amount of data was stolen during the cyber attack. The e-mail accounts of several MPs and that of Chancellor Angela Merkel were also affected.
Merkel publicly blamed Russian intelligence services for the hacker attack on the Bundestag in May. The EU and Russia have also imposed sanctions on each other in the dispute over the poison attack on the Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny in August this year and over the conflict in Ukraine.
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