The Russian Foreign Ministry announced the expansion of the list of German citizens banned from entering the territory of Russia, in response to sanctions taken by the European Union against Russian citizens.
The Russian Foreign Ministry stressed – in its statement, according to the (Russia Today) news channel today / Tuesday / – that, according to the principle of diplomatic reciprocity, new German citizens have been added to the list of those banned from entering Russian territory, including senior officials in the German security and intelligence services. Which are part of the German Ministry of Defense system.
The ministry statement continued: “Berlin has been promoting the story of (Russian hackers) allegations of hacking into the Bundestag’s computer networks in 2015 in the media for a long time, in order to create a pretext for imposing new sanctions by the European Union against Russia.”
The statement added: “The Russian side has repeatedly appealed to the German parties to conduct bilateral consultations of experts to uncover the truth of the German allegations (in this case towards Russian hackers) and in order to identify the sources of cyber activity, but the German authorities ignored these proposals, and this approach indicates that they were not in Berlin. Never really interested in conducting a real investigation into the so-called Russian hacker case, and the whole situation was originally designed to be another provocation against our country .. In response to the above measures taken by the European Union, Moscow took a decision to expand the list of German citizens prohibited from entering the territory of Russia.
The ministry affirmed that Russia reserves the right to take further response measures, adding, “If the German side continues the front line and hostility, we reserve the right to take further response measures.”
Recall that on October 22, it was reported that the European Union had included Russian citizens and one organization on the sanctions list due to a cyber attack on the German Bundestag.
And at the end of May, the German Foreign Ministry had summoned the Russian ambassador in Berlin, Sergey Nitschief, and he was notified that the Attorney General’s office in Germany had placed Russia on the most wanted list on suspicion of participating in a hacker attack on the Bundestag in April and May 2015.
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