Mikhail Kasyanov, former Prime Minister of Russia who is now a member of the political opposition, has handed a list to US Congress containing the names of TV journalists who he believes should fall under the Magnitsky Act for “hounding” murdered opposition politician Boris Nemtsov.
The list includes TV presenters Vladimir Solovyov, head of state-owned news agency Rossiya Segodnya Dmitri Kiselev, Arkady Mamontov, Andrei Karaulov, Konstantin Syomin, head of NTV Broadcasting Company Vladimir Kulistikov, and head of VGTRK (All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company) Oleg Dobrodeev, as well as parliament member and journalist Alexei Pushkov.
The document given to US Congress includes a section entitled “Examples of public calls for the extrajudicial killing of Boris Nemtsov.” Vladimir Solovyov (a presented on a talk show on the state-owned channel Rossiya 1) has been included in the list because he called Nemtsov a “wasted thief.” Konstantin Syomin (an anchor on the news program Vesti on Rossiya 1) was included because he said that “if the Germans had come to Moscow in 1941, someone like Nemtsov would have probably welcomed them.”
“They are not journalists, as they call themselves, but rather they are propagandists. They are people who are, in effect, government employees, who use state resources to create an atmosphere of hatred and intolerance in the country towards those who oppose the political course of those in power,” stated a co-author of the list, Vladimir Kara-Murza.
The Magnitsky Act, passed in the USA in 2012, is a bill punishing human rights abusers and those involved in extrajudicial killings by denying them entrance to the USA, denying rights to owning property in the USA, and blocking them from using the American banking system. Currently, the bill lists individuals allegedly responsible for the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a Moscow prison in 2009.
Opposition politician and former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov had lobbied in favor of passing the Magnitsky Act.
Nemtsov was gunned down on February 27 in Moscow. Criminal proceedings against suspects in the murder case are currently underway. The suspects are all men from the Russian North Caucasus.