The official representative of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Maria Zakharova spoke about the mention of Alexei Navalny in international negotiations: Swedish Foreign Minister and OSCE Chairman-in-Office Ann Linde, she said, began negotiations with the words of how she spilled coffee on a Russian. Zakharova told about this on her Facebook page, a screenshot of her post was published by the RT in Russian Telegram channel.
“The Swedish Foreign Minister began negotiations with Sergei Lavrov with a story about how she spilled coffee on Navalny,” the diplomat wrote and added that the Russian minister replied with the phrase “You are a dangerous woman.” The post referenced by RT is missing on Maria Zakharova’s page at Facebook .
According to the Interfax agency, the Swedish side began negotiations between the two countries by expressing concern about the situation with democracy, civil and human rights in the Russian Federation, and also raised the topic of Navalny’s alleged poisoning and his detention.
In mid-January, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that the West’s statements about Navalny are “like a carbon copy.” According to him, their main goal is to divert attention from the crisis, in which the liberal development model finds itself. At the same time, the press secretary of the Russian president Dmitry Peskov noted that the Kremlin does not intend to listen to the statements of Western countries regarding the detention and arrest of Navalny.
The detention of Navalny at the Sheremetyevo airport became known on Sunday, January 17. This happened on the basis of the decision of the head of the Federal Penitentiary Service in Moscow, according to which the oppositionist was put on the wanted list for systematic violations of the conditions of the probationary period. On January 18, he was arrested for 30 days.
Before his arrest, he was in Berlin, where he was delivered on August 22, 2020. Two days earlier, during the flight from Tomsk to Moscow, Navalny felt unwell, and the plane was urgently landed in Omsk. Navalny himself and Western countries suspect the Russian leadership of the poisoning.