BRUSSELS (BELGIUM) – The European Union and Britain enforced sanctions on top Russian officials close to President Vladimir Putin on Thursday as a response to the August poisoning of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.
After being pressurised by France and Germany, the EU and Britain targeted six Russians and a state scientific research centre accusing for deploying a banned nerve agent designed for military use against Navalny.
French President Emmanuel Macron told at an EU summit. He called for talks with Moscow. “We Europeans remain committed to the fight against chemical weapons.”
The Kremlin condemned the sanctions as a deliberate move against Moscow and guaranteed retaliation.
Unlike the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain in 2018, during when the EU took almost a year to sanction military intelligence agents, the bloc aimed at officials it alleges to have planned and helped carry out the poisoning.
Andrei Yarin, head of the presidential policy directorate, Sergei Kiriyenko, Putin’s first deputy chief of staff, Sergei Menyaylo, Putin’s envoy to Siberia, Alexander Bortnikov, the director of Russia’s Federal Security Service and two deputy defence ministers were targeted.
The State Scientific Research Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology was also sanctioned. The Official Journal said, “The deployment of a toxic nerve agent of the Novichok group would … only be possible due to the failure of the Institute to carry out its responsibility to destroy the stockpiles of chemical weapons.”
Moscow has dismissed accusations that Navalny was poisoned with a Soviet-style Novichok nerve agent.
Paris and Berlin say no credible explanation from Moscow has been got to validate the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’s claim of finding Novichok in Navalny’s body.
In the British case of the poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in 2018, traces of Novichok were also found.
Navalny is recovering in Germany.