From the department of Tit for Tat, on the heels of a cascade of sanctions against Russia, Russian organizations and Russian individuals over Russia’s aggressive war in Ukraine, the Russian Foreign Ministry now has issued a list of U.S. figures that are now prohibited from entering Russia — and will be indefinitely.
The list includes politicians as high up as Vice President Kamala Harris, but also tech leaders Mark Zuckerberg and Ryan Roslansky, respectively the CEOs of Meta and LinkedIn, as well as journalists and others with profiles who it says are promoting a “Russophobic” agenda.
Zuckerberg, as the head of the king of social media in the West and the head of platforms Russia has already blocked, is not a surprise. But I don’t know why Roslansky got on there and Parag Agrawal, the CEO of Twitter, did not. Twitter has been as proactive as Meta’s Facebook in acting on Russian misinformation, but on the other hand it remains a lucrative channel for RTing, well, RT. (RT is of course Russian-state-backed.)
On the other hand, LinkedIn has had a longstanding standoff with Russia and one of the ongoing side stories to the Ukraine war has been the exodus of people out of Russia who are getting increasingly concerned about their freedoms and Russia’s Ukrainian and global stances.
The list is also an extension to Russia also acting to shut down or restrict access to a number of Western platforms that are not complying with its regulations on information dissemination, specifically for trying to limit pro-Russian messaging. Those shutdowns have included shutting down access to Facebook and Instagram, limiting access to Google News and issuing warnings about YouTube.
Meanwhile, Apple, Google, Microsoft and many others have shut down or paused operations in the country in an escalating game of whack-a-mole around sanctions that have been leveled in fulfilling sanction actions.
Here’s the full list, although don’t fret if your own faves aren’t on there yet! It’s promising to issue more names soon.