WASHINGTON — The Obama administration plans to blacklist five Russians, including a close aide to President Vladimir Putin, for human-rights abuses, throwing down a gauntlet to President-elect Donald Trump nearly two weeks before he takes office with a promise to thaw relations with Russia.
The sanctions, announced by the Treasury Department, are not related to allegations of Russian hacking during the presidential election, according to a senior official. But they will carry symbolic weight, as perhaps the last visible act the United States will take against Russia before power is transferred in Washington.
The biggest name on the sanctions list is Alexander I. Bastrykin, chief public investigator, who reports directly to Putin and has carried out an array of political investigations.
US officials say he was complicit in the case of Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer who died in detention in November 2009 and whom the Magnitsky Act was named after. Under that 2012 US law, passed with Democratic and Republican support, the Treasury and Justice departments must sanction Russian individuals who were involved in that case and subsequent coverups, or in other cases of human rights abuses.
The sanctions imposed Monday include a ban on travel to the United States and a freezing of any assets held by US financial institutions.
The Obama administration has enforced the law with varying degrees of enthusiasm, depending on the state of relations between the United States and Russia. But its final list of names is considered unusually robust, said the senior official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The Magnitsky Act has long antagonized the Russian government. Shortly after the law was passed, the Russian Parliament voted to ban the adoption of Russian children by Americans. In 2013, Russia released a list of Americans barred from traveling to Russia for purported human-rights violations.
Just before Christmas, the Treasury Department put sanctions on 15 Russian individuals and companies for their dealings in Crimea and Ukraine. Trump is expected to ease that economic pressure campaign.
But it may be harder for him to ignore the Magnitsky Act, since it was passed with bipartisan support and requires the executive branch to submit a list of names annually.
In addition to Bastrykin, the administration is targeting Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun, two Russian intelligence officers who were identified by British authorities as the men who poisoned a fellow Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko, in London in 2006. Also on the list are Stanislav Gordievsky and Gennady Plaksin, two lower-level officials who the United States said were involved in the coverup of Magnitsky’s death.
In Moscow Monday, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Kremlin believes the accusations made in the US intelligence agency report on Russian hacking activities during the election have no substance.
‘‘They are amateurish and are hardly worthy of the high professional standards of top intelligence agencies . . . This is beginning to remind us of a full-fledged witch hunt,’’ he said.
Margarita Simonyan, editor of the government-funded TV channel RT, said in a blog post: ‘‘Dear CIA: You get a total F for this thing you wrote. You don’t cover the subject sufficiently, the sources are unnamed, out of date or simply incorrect, and it is written like a school homework assignment.’’
Also Monday, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange denounced the US report, calling it a politically motivated ‘‘press release’’ that provided no evidence Russian actors gave WikiLeaks hacked material, the Associated Press reported
National Intelligence Director James Clapper told a congressional panel last week that he does not think Assange is credible.
‘‘I don’t think those with the intelligence community have a whole lot of respect for him,’’ Clapper said.
The report accused Russia of trying to interfere with the US political process, by hacking into the e-mail accounts of the Democratic National Committee and individual Democrats like Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.
The report said Russia also used propaganda and paid ‘‘trolls’’ to make nasty comments on social media, though there was no suggestion Russia affected the actual vote count.
The report explicitly tied Putin to the hackings.
