Navalny affair: Moscow takes action against European leaders

 

Russia responds. Tuesday, December 22, Moscow announced sanctions against European officials, in retaliation for measures adopted in October by the EU after the alleged poisoning of Alexey Navalny. This Russian announcement comes the day after the broadcast of a telephone conversation in which the main opponent in the country claims to have trapped an agent of the Russian special services (FSB) to make him admit the poisoning.

Russian diplomacy said “it has expanded the list of representatives of EU member states banned from entering the territory of the Russian Federation”. She did not release the names. The Foreign Ministry explained that it judged the European sanctions targeting six Russian personalities, including Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the FSB, “unacceptable”, “under the pretext of their alleged participation in the incident involving Citizen Navalny”.

The representative of the French embassy referred to

These counter-sanctions were announced to representatives of the embassies of France, Germany and Sweden, summoned to the ministry for the occasion. These are the three countries whose laboratories have identified a Novichok-type neurotoxic substance in the opponent’s body, then hospitalized in Germany. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had warned in mid-November that the counter-sanctions would target “top executives of the German and French apparatuses”.

Russia also accuses Berlin, but also Paris, Stockholm and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons of not handing over their files involving Novichok, a substance developed for military purposes during the Soviet era. She assures that Alexeï Navalny had no poison in his body when he was hospitalized in Siberia and that, for lack of cooperation from the Europeans, no investigation can be opened in Russia.

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