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Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Monday (February 22) criticized the European Union’s decision to impose sanctions on Russian officials for the crackdown on Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny and his supporters.
EU foreign ministers agreed early Monday to impose sanctions on four top Russian officials, diplomats told AFP, after Navalny’s associates urged the ministers to go after oligarchs accused of funding the Russian government. President Vladimir Putin.
The diplomats did not name the people attacked or give details about them.
In a statement, Russia’s Foreign Ministry called the new sanctions “disappointing” and said they were prepared on an “implausible pretext.”
“In obedience to the bloc’s school of thought and anti-Russian stereotypes, Brussels is instinctively pressing the ‘button’ for breached sanctions,” he said.
Navalny was jailed last month after returning to Moscow from Germany, where he spent months recovering from a poisoning attack that blames Putin. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied that it was behind the attack.
The imprisonment of Putin’s best-known opponent sparked protests across the country that saw thousands of protesters arrested and sparked calls in the West for Navalny’s release.
A Moscow court on Saturday upheld a ruling to send Navalny to a penal colony for more than two years for violating a 2014 suspended sentence on fraud charges, despite the fact that Europe’s court of rights demanded that Russia release the critic. of the Kremlin and considered the sentence “arbitrary”.
“We consider the constant illegal and absurd demands for the ‘release’ of a citizen of the Russian Federation who was convicted of economic crimes by a Russian court on the territory of our country in accordance with Russian law categorically unacceptable,” said the Ministry of Foreign Relations of Russia. .
“In international practice, this is called interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state,” he added.
The EU previously sanctioned Russia for the August poisoning of Navalny with Novichok, a Soviet-era nerve agent, and blacklisted six Russian officials in October.
The bloc has previously slapped Moscow with various sanctions over the 2014 annexation of Crimea and Russia’s role in the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
