Chechen leader mocks sanctions & travel ban, says got ‘no order to step on US soil yet’
The head of Russia’s Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, has said that while he is proud to be sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act, the US should search for real human rights abusers at home, “in the White House and the Pentagon.”
Kadyrov seemed flattered to be placed on the US sanctions list alongside four other Russian nationals Wednesday. The Chechen leader said he felt himself a highly distinguished person having received “so many merits from America.”
“Oh, the Magnitsky list. It means I’m violating human rights,” Kadyrov said sarcastically, while getting off a lifting bench with an enormous barbell. “Poor Americans! One small but proud Chechen republic haunts an entire country.”
Washington, however, “may not worry,” since he has “not received an order to step on the US soil yet,” Kadyrov went on, referring to the entry ban imposed on him as one of the “features” of the Magnitsky list.
“So, I’ve been barred from entering the US. But would I apply for visa, do I have assets in the US banks? I’ve said already but will repeat for the most oblivious, that I would not travel to the US even if I’d been offered all the monetary reserves of the country as a prize,” the Chechen leader said further in the post attached to the video.
Kadyrov insisted he was sanctioned not because of some alleged human rights abuses, but rather due to his relentless lifelong fight against terrorists, many of whom were “fosterlings of the American special services.”
“I can be proud that I’m displeasing for the US intelligence agencies,” he said. “They say that sanctions are somehow linked to human rights abuses. Well, then why look for people to fill the list on the other side of the world, when they are right in the White House and in the Pentagon?”
Kadyrov also provided his own list of wars and human rights violations the US was involved in, and wondered if “all the US presidents and defense ministers” implicated were sanctioned as well.
“Have you forgotten about the massacred Indigenous Americans, millions of African slaves, victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, millions of the Vietnamese, the Son My village, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Belgrade… My list contains thousands of bloody deeds of the US,” Kadyrov said.
“So for whom the bell tolls?” he concluded, adding there is “peace and stability in Chechnya, while the US sheds blood all over the world.”
