MOSCOW: Russia said Tuesday it was hitting EU officials with sanctions for their response to the poisoning of opposition figure Alexei Navalny, who the Kremlin said was suffering from “delusions of persecution”.
The foreign ministry in Moscow summoned several senior EU diplomats before announcing the new travel bans.
In response to “confrontational” sanctions imposed by the bloc in October, Russia “decided to expand the list of representatives of EU member states and institutions who will be denied entry to Russia.”
Navalny stands near law enforcement agents in a hallway of a business centre, which houses the office of his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), in Moscow. – AFP file photo
The announcement on Tuesday came a day after Navalny, 44, said in a report he had impersonated an official in the Kremlin’s Security Council and extracted an admission of guilt from a toxins expert with the FSB security service.
In a video of the conversation published by Navalny, the alleged FSB agent says agents placed poison in Navalny’s underwear this summer.
The anti-corruption campaigner was flown for treatment to Germany where labs concluded he was poisoned with Novichok, a Soviet-designed nerve agent.
Navalny’s video of his conversation with the man named Konstantin Kudryavtsev racked up more than 12 million views in less than 24 hours and social media were abuzz with memes about Navalny’s underpants.
The Kremlin on Tuesday described Navalny as a “sick” man who was suffering from “delusions of persecution”.
A view of the Federal Security Service (FSB) headquarters in downtown Moscow. — AFP photo
President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that Navalny’s claims could discredit the FSB, adding the opposition politician also exhibited “traits of megalomania.”
“They say he compares himself to Jesus,” Peskov added.
Observers said it was hard to predict the fallout from Navalny’s revelations.
“This is a political Chernobyl,” said prominent commentator Yulia Latynina, referring to the 1986 nuclear disaster in Soviet Ukraine. “After this the system cannot exist in its current form,” she wrote in the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta.
Authorities hit back against Navalny’s supporters. His top ally Lyubov Sobol spent hours at a police station and was questioned overnight before being released.
Ivan Zhdanov, the head of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund, told AFP that they planned to launch a formal complaint with the FSB on Tuesday.
The FSB described the phone call as “fake” and said it would not have been possible without “the support of foreign intelligence services.
Last week Putin rejected reports that the FSB had poisoned Navalny, saying that if the security services had wanted to poison the opposition politician, “they would have taken it to the end.”
Putin, himself a former KGB officer, over the weekend hailed Russia’s “courageous” spies and thanked them for protecting the country from “external and internal threats.”
But some analysts said Navalny’s revelations raised new questions about the professionalism of Russia’s security services. – AFP