President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden were among those included in Russia’s sanctions package Tuesday.
The sanctions prohibit several U.S. top officials from entering Russia, including former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and were taken as a “response measure” to U.S. sanctions on Russia.
Hunter Biden was a board member of Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings until 2019, but the reason behind his inclusion on the list is unclear.
Others included on the list are: Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, CIA Director William Burns and White House press secretary Jen Psaki.
“This step, taken as a response measure, is the inevitable result of the extreme Russophobic policy of the current US Administration, which, in a desperate attempt to maintain American hegemony, has abandoned any sense of decorum and placed its bets on the head-on containment of Russia,” the statement from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.