Status: 08/21/2021 00:57
In the case of the poison attack on Kremlin critic Navalny a year ago, the USA and Great Britain are drawing further conclusions: Both countries imposed further sanctions on Russian intelligence agents.
One year after the poison attack on the Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, the US imposed further sanctions on several employees of the Russian domestic intelligence service FSB.
In total, the punitive measures affect eight FSB agents as well as two other people and several institutions from the Russian secret service and scientific apparatus.
Attack as part of an “ongoing campaign”
“The poisoning of Navalny was a shocking violation of international chemical weapons standards and was part of an ongoing campaign to silence dissent in Russia,” said Treasury Department Director Andrea Gacki who have favourited further sanctions. The US State Department said that there should be no impunity for the use of chemical weapons.
Travel Bans and Frozen Accounts
Great Britain also ordered further punitive measures against seven Russian secret service employees. The agents concerned will be banned from traveling, and any assets in the USA and Great Britain will be frozen. The British Foreign Office said the men were “directly responsible” “for planning or carrying out the attack” on Navalny.
Like the USA, the British Foreign Minister Dominic Raab clearly condemned the use of chemical weapons “by the Russian state”, which constitutes a breach of international law. Raab again called for “transparent investigations” into the attack on Navalny.
The British government imposed initial sanctions last October in response to the poison attack on the Kremlin critic. In March of this year, the US and the EU imposed sanctions on several Russian officials, including the head of the FSB, Alexander Bortnikov, and close associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Russia insists on evidence of allegations
Russia reacted with harsh criticism to the renewed punitive measures. The Russian Foreign Office spokeswoman, Maria Sakharova, stressed that her government had repeatedly asked the United States and Great Britain to provide evidence for their allegations. The Western countries have “ignored” this so far.
Navalny collapsed on August 20 last year on a flight from Tomsk in Siberia to Moscow and then fell into a coma. He was brought to the Berlin Charité for treatment. He was allegedly poisoned with a chemical nerve agent from the so-called Novitschok group.
After receiving treatment in Germany, Navalny was arrested on his return to Russia in January and later sentenced to more than two years in a camp for alleged violations of probation conditions.