US to Label White Supremacist Group as Terrorist Organization for First Time

The Trump administration reportedly plans to designate the far-right Russian Imperial Movement as a terrorist organization, the first time the designation has been applied to a white supremacist group.

The designation will allow the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control to seize assets belonging to the organization in the U.S. and prohibit Americans from financial  dealings with the group.

Officials said the U.S. will also designate three of the organization’s leaders, Stanislav Anatolyevich Vorobyev, Denis Valliullovich Gariev and Nikolay Nikolayevich Trushchalov, as terrorists, making them subject to similar sanctions at a personal level.

The group, an ultranationalist Russian organization, has aided in the recruitment of soldiers to back up pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine, and in 2017, Swedish prosecutors said three men accused of plotting bomb attacks against asylum-seekers were trained by members of the organization in St. Petersburg.

“These designations are unprecedented,” Ambassador Nathan A. Sales, the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator, told The New York Times. “This is the first time the United States has ever designated white supremacists as terrorists.”

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