The Council of the European Union decided to impose sanctions against persons associated with the conviction of Alexei Navalny, the founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK, included by the Ministry of Justice in the register of organizations performing the functions of a foreign agent). This was announced by the head of EU diplomacy, Josep Borrell, reports TASS.
According to Borrell, the measures will be approved and adopted within a week. He outlined the general opinion that the foreign ministers of the bloc countries came to after the talks on February 22: Russia in their view is a neighbor, which, however, behaves like a political enemy.
Borrell also said that the European Union and the United States decided to closely coordinate their actions against the Russian Federation and China.
The fact that the foreign ministers of the EU countries were preparing to impose sanctions against four high-ranking Russian security officials became known earlier on February 22. At their meeting, no specific names were named, but, most likely, we are talking about the heads of the Investigative Committee, the Federal Penitentiary Service, the Russian Guard and the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation.
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas earlier on February 22 called for the continuation of a constructive dialogue with Russia, despite the clearly difficult situation in relations with the Russian state.
In early February, the court changed Navalny’s suspended sentence in the Yves Rocher case to a real one, sentencing him to 3.5 years in a general regime colony. This decision drew strong criticism from Western countries.