Kyiv [Ukraine], November 19: President VolodymyrZelenskiy has sanctioned 37 Russian groups and 108 people including a former prime minister and a former education minister and said he aimed to fight wartime abductions of children from Ukraine and other "Russian terror".
"We are increasing the pressure of our state onto them and each of them must be held responsible for what they have done," he said in his nightly video address on Saturday, after his office issued corresponding decrees with his signature.
Zelenskiy did not associate specific individuals or groups with particular wrongdoings. The decrees showed a range of 10-year penalties against individuals and five-year penalties against non-profit groups including one named in English as the "Russian Children's Foundation."
Zelenskiy said in his address that the list included "those involved in the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children from the occupied territory" and individuals who "in various ways help Russian terror against Ukraine."
Some of the newly-sanctioned people, which included many with Russian citizenship, had previously been punished with separate or similar penalties.
Those included DmytroTabachnyk, a former minister of education and science who had his Ukrainian citizenship stripped from him in February, and ex-Prime Minister MykolaAzarov.
With former President Viktor Yanukovich, Azarov previously had assets and property frozen among other penalties. The two men fled Ukraine for Russia in 2014 after a crackdown on street protests that killed more than 100 demonstrators in Kyiv.
Source: Fijian Broadcasting Corporation