WASHINGTON — In theory, the action by Congress this week to make Russia a full trading partner — finally doing away with a 38-year ban that once punished the Soviet Union over its restrictive emigration rules — could have begun a new era of happier ties between former cold war rivals.
Instead, it has set off a burst of ire, as American lawmakers used the opportunity to approve new legislation chastising Russia over its human rights record.
The bill, which President Obama is expected to sign, imposes steep penalties on Russians designated as violators of human rights — barring them from travel to the United States and freezing any financial assets here.
It would also require the administration to develop a list of rights abusers and effectively prevent anyone on it from owning property or doing business in the United States, where many wealthy Russians have maintained substantial assets and investments.
Far from celebrating its new, favored trade status, the Kremlin has reacted with rage, pledging to retaliate with its own restrictions and accusing the United States and its European allies of hypocrisy on the issue of human rights. The Russian Foreign Ministry said it was “strange and wild to hear complaints about us from politicians of a state, which has, in the 21st century, allowed legal torture and abduction of people all over the world.”
In comments posted on the ministry’s Web site on Friday, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov said that he warned Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton about the consequences of the legislation on Thursday in Dublin, where they met with the United Nations special envoy on Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi. “I confirmed that Russia will refuse entry to its territory to American citizens who are truly guilty of gross violations of human rights,” Mr. Lavrov said.
The bill won praise, however, from some of President Vladimir V. Putin’s most prominent critics — a development that was certain to only further inflame the Kremlin.
“Excellent,” Aleksei Navalny, the anticorruption advocate and political opposition leader, declared in a Twitter post. “I congratulate those who managed this. At least, there is some place in the world where they punish thieves and the murders of our fellow citizens.”
Although passage of the legislation was expected, the new acrimony further imperils a relationship that has been deeply strained in recent months, particularly by disagreements over how to stem the violence in Syria.
The two countries have also been at odds over the American plan for a missile defense system in Europe, as well as Russia’s crackdown on political dissent and on nongovernmental organizations.
The strains have also worsened at a time when the United States wants Russia’s cooperation on numerous other matters, including containing Iran’s nuclear weapons program, as well as maintaining crucial supply routes that will be vital for the withdrawal of American troops and supplies from Afghanistan.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said that if the relationship soured, it was America’s fault. “We do not want to turn away from the positive sides in our bilateral relations, which have been developed in recent years with no small amount of effort,” it said. “But it is necessary to give our assessment that the law approved by the Senate will rather negatively affect the prospects for bilateral cooperation. Responsibility for this, naturally, lies wholly on the U.S.A.”
Other Russian officials noted caustically that the United States was guilty of its own human rights violations, citing abuses in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, as well as at the terrorist detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and at secret C.I.A. prisons in Europe.
While granting full trade status is a step that stands to benefit American businesses as much if not more than their Russian counterparts, many lawmakers in Washington said that they could not reconcile themselves to normalizing trade relations without holding Mr. Putin’s government accountable for what they described, in scathing terms, as systematic rights abuses, pervasive corruption and disrespect for the rule of law, as well as the suppression of political dissent.
Bill on Russia Trade Sets Off Acrimony on Rights
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Bill on Russia Trade Sets Off Acrimony on Rights
