The appointment was reportedly instigated by Igor Sechin, wishing to retain his influence after the dismissal of his close ally Vladimir Ustinov from the position of prosecutor general in 2006.

[9][10] On January 9, 2017, under the Magnitsky Act, the United States Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control updated its Specially Designated Nationals List and blacklisted Aleksandr I. Bastrykin, Andrei K. Lugovoi, Dmitri V. Kovtun, Stanislav Gordievsky, and Gennady Plaksin, which froze any of their assets held by American financial institutions or transactions with those institutions and banned their travelling to the United States.

[14][15] On 26 July 2012 Russian blogger and anticorruption activist Alexey Navalny published documents indicating that Bastrykin had a residence permit and owned real estate in the Czech Republic.

Mr. Navalny wrote that the real estate holding and residence permit in a country belonging to NATO, a military alliance opposed to Russia, should raise questions about Mr. Bastrykin's security clearance for work in law enforcement and access to state secrets.

[20] In 2016, Bastrykin expressed the need to establish official national ideology and censor the Internet, on the grounds that there is information warfare against Russia launched by USA and its allies.