Moscow vows to retaliate over new 'anti-Russian' US sanctions

Washington targets financier Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose company was charged with using fake social media accounts to spread disinformation ahead of US elections

MOSCOW — Russia on Monday said it was “bewildered” by fresh US sanctions and vowed to retaliate following what it called an “anti-Russian attack.”

The foreign ministry said the new sanctions on several Russians — including a businessman tied to President Vladimir Putin and a disinformation operation accused of conspiring to manipulate the US 2018 midterm election — “will not go unanswered.”

“We urge American politicians to stop this useless sanctions game, the result of which is zero, and to return to the position of common sense,” the ministry said in a statement.

The financial sanctions, which target Russian financier Evgeny Prigozhin, some of his assets and the so-called Internet Research Agency, are the first to be taken under an executive order signed last year by US President Donald Trump seeking to punish foreign actors accused of interfering in US elections.

The US Treasury announced the sanctions on Monday.

Russia’s foreign ministry said the sanctions were part of an “internal political crisis” in the United States in which “Russian issues are deliberately used by part of the Washington establishment as a tool to achieve their own opportunistic goals.”

The sanctions marked the third time the US had added Prigozhin’s name to its list of foreign nationals formally barred from the US financial system, a move which freezes him out of much of the global financial system as well.

This photo from October 20, 2018, shows a business center building known as the ‘troll factory,’ part of the Internet Research Agency, one of a web of companies allegedly controlled by Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has reported ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, in St. Petersburg, Russia . (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky, File)

US prosecutors last year indicted the Internet Research Agency as well as alleged employees, charging them with a broad conspiracy to influence the 2016 elections by spreading disinformation in the United States via social media.

The US Treasury said Monday the agency had announced its intention to do likewise in the 2018 midterms by seeking to discredit candidates it viewed as hostile to Moscow.

There was no evidence they were successful in preventing voting, altering vote counts or disrupting vote tallying, the Treasury said.