MOSCOW, April 15. /ITAR-TASS/. More than 52,000 Russians have put their signatures under an appeal to the United States authorities to be included into the White House blacklist issued over the Crimean developments.

It is planned to stage a rally in front of the U.S. embassy in Moscow on April 17 and hand over these signatures to the American diplomatic mission, Artem Kiryanov, a Vice President of the Russian Union of Young Lawyers and the author of the initiative, said on Tuesday.

He said that the usagoaway.ru project had been launched in the internet on March 25. It offered Russian citizens to sign a declaration of voluntary accession to the U.S. blacklist of persons subject to sanctions. Popular Russian journalists, political scientists, show business people have put their signatures under this declaration.

“The project Add Your Name to the U.S. Blacklist is very important not only because it has demonstrated society’s readiness to consolidate,” Kiryanov said. “It is important as an indicator of changing mentality when people become proud for their country. The project demonstrates the position of Russians that threatening with sanctions is a senseless thing. We are not a third world country and isolations of Russia in conditions of the globalizing world economy and open information technologies is a step back to the Middle Ages.”

“Such policy of the United States and their partners has no sense,” he stressed.