U.S. State Department Designates Russian White Supremacist Group As Foreign Terroristsl; Department Says It Can’t “Designate Groups With Substantial Connection To United States”

For the first time ever, the U.S. Department has categorized a white supremacist group.

On Monday, Nathan Sales, coordinator for the department, announced the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM) and three of its leaders: Stanislav Anatolyevich Vorobyev, Denis Valliullovich Gariev, and Nikolay Nikolayevich Trushchalov have all been marked as Specially Designated Global Terrorists.

Sales said RIM is “a terrorist group that provides paramilitary-style training to neo-Nazis and white supremacists.” He added that it “plays a prominent role in trying to rally like-minded Europeans and Americans into a common front against their perceived enemies. This is the first time the United States has ever designated white supremacist terrorists, illustrating how seriously this administration takes the threat,” Sales said.

While there are many other white terrorist groups, like the Ku Klux Klan, that should be determined a domestic terrorist organization, amid the resurgence of white nationalist and white supremacist, have come about more since Donald Trump’s time in office, The State Department claims it doesn’t “have the authority to designate groups with a substantial connection to the United States.” Sales said the new designation is to prevent RIM from infiltrating America.

“We see what RIM-trained terrorists can do in Europe, and we want to make sure that RIM is not able — or any terrorist group is not able — to accomplish something similar here in the United States. That is to say, providing training that could enable violent attacks and deadly attacks here in the homeland,” Sales said. “That is why we are designating RIM today because it enables us to better protect our borders to keep these terrorists out of our country and to deny them resources they might use to plan additional training that could harm our interests.”