John Yoo isn’t very perceptive:

But seriously, I couldn’t go to Russia during the Cold War and I can’t go now. What’s the difference these days in regimes? Obama has as much chance of resetting relations with Putin as he would have with Stalin [bold mine-DL].

This is a very stupid thing to say, but unfortunately it seems that it is a fairly common view of contemporary Russia among many Republicans in America. Russia has an authoritarian and often illiberal government, its political and legal systems are rife with corruption and abuse (of which the Magnitsky case is one example), and it is far from being a free country. That said, the differences between the current Russian regime and the old Soviet one, especially under Stalin, are so huge and glaring that one has to be completely ignorant of contemporary Russia and Soviet history not to see them. The fact that Yoo and other hawks pretend that U.S. relations with Russia have to be as bad now as relations with the USSR were at the start of the Cold War proves that their ideas on Russia policy can’t be trusted. Yoo and other former U.S. officials are being banned from Russia as part of the Kremlin’s useless retaliation over the Magnitsky Act. The Kremlin is feigning interest in genuine U.S. abuses, such as torture and indefinite detention, but of course these things are of no real concern to Moscow and never have been. The travel bans are intended to make a simple point: Russia can pretend to care about U.S. government abuses just as easily as our Congress pretends to care about Russian abuses, and pointless moral hectoring can go both ways.

As for the Magnitsky Act itself, it has succeeded in worsening U.S.-Russian relations as its critics said it would, but it doesn’t seem to have achieved anything constructive. Then again, I always assumed that the purpose of the Magnitsky Act was to sour relations between the U.S. and Russia, so in that sense it has “worked” as expected. The good news is that U.S.-Russian relations haven’t been entirely derailed by Congressional action. Matthew Rojansky explains:

While these consultations yielded no breakthroughs, both sides confirmed their “productive” tone, which has laid the groundwork for bilateral relations to pivot from Magnitsky to another kind of list: the long list of shared U.S. and Russian interests, from nuclear security and arms control to enhanced economic ties and implementation of a new visa liberalization agreement, all of which have been on hold thanks to 2012’s election-year politics and the fallout from Magnitsky. After more than a year of escalating tension and declining trust, consensus on tough issues like ending the conflict in Syria or managing the situation in and around Afghanistan post-2014 will remain elusive. Yet a robust record of U.S.-Russia cooperation on talks with Iran and North Korea, as well as joint efforts on counterterrorism and nonproliferation, suggest that progress is possible.