The recently sanctioned Bosnian Lawmaker Nikola Spiric said it’s hard not to think that the recent sanctions against him and his family members are aimed at presenting the Serb people as enemies of the EU, and other peoples as leaders on the road to EU.

“I can openly say that Serbs are more pro-EU and pro-European values than Ankara and Teheran’s pawns and false Bosnian patriots,” Spiric said.

The US State Department said last week that it has banned Bosnian Serb lawmaker Nikola Spiric and members of his immediate family from entering the US over Spiric's alleged “involvement in significant corruption.”

He reiterated that “sanctions against him are completely irrelevant to him because the world will soon know who is behind them” and added that he still wonders what his wife and children have to do with the charges against him.

“Who needs to blackmail me through my wife and children in the 21st century? Why should they be the victims of the politics from which I have no intention of backing? We believed that such times were behind us but obviously, they’re not,” Spiric concluded.

Spiric was sanctioned under Section 7031(c) of the Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Act of 2018, which says that, should the US Secretary of State have credible information that foreign officials were involved in “significant corruption or gross violations of human rights, those individuals and their immediate family members are ineligible for entry into the United States.”