US President Joe Biden and members of his family were banned from entering the territory of the Penza region. The order was signed by the governor of the region Oleg Melnichenko.
“Our region does not welcome on its territory people on whose hands the blood of tens of thousands of civilians, who allow themselves direct insults against Russia and its population. We don’t need such people,” he wrote in his Telegram channel.
However, Biden could not get into the Penza region even before Melnichenko's order. He was banned from entering Russia back in March 2022. The corresponding statement was published on the website of the Russian Foreign Ministry:
“This step, taken as a counter reaction, was the inevitable consequence of the extremely Russophobic course taken by the current US Administration, which, in a desperate attempt to maintain American hegemony, has staked, discarding all decency, on the frontal containment of Russia.”
Biden is not the first to be banned from entering certain regions of Russia. In July 2014, the head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, created his own sanctions list and included Barack Obama, then US President, on it. He forbade him and other members of the list to visit the territory of the region and "instructed to freeze their bank accounts and any assets." In 2016, the Kremlin imposed sanctions on former US Ambassador to Russia Mike McFaul.
