The United States has imposed sanctions on Russia for this matter …

The United States on Tuesday announced the imposition of sanctions against seven senior Russian officials, in response to the suspected poisoning of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalni.. Among the sanctioned, which will suffer from visa restrictions and property freezes, is the director of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). In a coordinated move with the European Union, the United States insisted on its call for Russia to release the opposition leader, whose imprisonment in January upon his return to Moscow sparked a wave of demonstrations against the government of Vladimir Putin. Joe Biden’s government said it had reports confirming “with a high level of confidence” that Navalni had been poisoned by Russian intelligence agents with the chemical agent Novichok..

Alexander Bortnikov, who since 2008 has headed the intelligence service that succeeded the KGB, was one of seven senior Russian officials sanctioned, mainly, by the freezing of their assets in the United States. These are the first sanctions against the Kremlin announced by the new Biden administration.

“The intelligence community considers with a high level of confidence that officials of the Russian Federal Security Service used a nerve agent known as Novichok to poison Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalni on August 20, 2020,” he said. declared the spokesperson for the House. Jen Psaki. “We reiterate our call for the immediate and unconditional release of Navalni”added.

The Biden administration has also indicated that it will limit some exports to Russia, promising a stronger stance than that of its predecessor Donald Trump, who later expressed his admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin.. “We will take whatever action we deem appropriate to make it very clear that this type of behavior is unacceptable to us, and we will do so with our allies and partners,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an interview published Tuesday.

US officials plan to release new findings by intelligence agencies on other critical points with Moscow in the coming weeks. Topics include the accusations that Russia paid rewards to militants linked to the Taliban for the murder of American soldiers in Afghanistan, and their alleged involvement in the massive hacking against the American company SolarWinds.

Biden had had a telephone conversation with Putin in late January in which he discussed the extension of the New START nuclear disarmament agreement and demanded the immediate release of Navalni. “I made it very clear to President Putin that the days when the United States submitted to Russian aggression, interfering with our elections, with cyber attacks or poisoning its citizens, are over.”, assured the Democratic president a few days later.

In accordance with the measure ordered by the United States, the European Union approved sanctions against four senior Russian officials in the fields of justice and defense, involved in the arrest and subsequent conviction of Navalni. Those sanctioned will be banned from traveling to the European Union or the United States and their funds in those countries will be frozen.

They are the head of the investigating committee into naval poisoning, Alexander Bastrykin; the Russian Attorney General, Igor Krasnov, the head of the National Guard, Viktor Zolotov and the director of prisons, Alexander Kalashnikov. The European bloc has argued that these leaders are responsible for serious rights violations such as arbitrary detentions, systematic repression against peaceful demonstrations and against freedom of expression and opinion.

As expected, the Russian government has rejected the imposition of new sanctions and assured that these types of measures do not work. “Those who continue to have these restrictions should probably be thinking: are they achieving their goals with this policy?” Our answer will be obvious: this policy does not achieve its objectives“, assured the spokesperson for the Russian presidency, Dmitry Peskov.

For his part, the Russian senator Vladimir Dzhabarov I think that the sanctions against Moscow are a tool to “distract” from the internal problems of the United States. “Washington has crossed all the lines. One gets the impression that they don’t care about the pretext for imposing sanctions,” he told the RIA Nóvosti news agency.

Navalni, 44, felt terrible on a domestic flight, for which he had to make an emergency landing in Siberia. He was rushed and hospitalized in Berlin, where doctors said he was poisoned with Novichok, a nerve agent developed by Soviet researchers and was also believed to have been used in the attack on Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and her daughter Yulia in 2018.

After his recovery, Navalni defiantly returned to Moscow in January and was immediately arrested. He was sent to a penal colony east of the Russian capital, where he will serve a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence, which he considers political and unfounded. But According to Russian justice, a few weeks ago, when Navalni visited Germany, he violated the agreement of five years suspended prison sentence for embezzlement.