On Tuesday, Russia imposed sanctions on European Union officials because of their response to poisoning Alexey Navalny, saying that the opposition leader had a persecution complex and “compares to Jesus”. Moscow summoned several senior EU diplomats before announcing new travel bans in response to what it called the “confrontation” sanctions imposed by the bloc in October.
The Foreign Ministry said Moscow “has decided to expand the list of representatives of EU member countries and institutions that will be denied entry to Russia”.
The announcement came a day after Navalny, 44, said he had posed as an official on the Kremlin Security Council and extracted the admission of guilt from a toxin expert at the FSB security service.
In a video of the conversation posted by Navalny, the alleged FSB agent says the agents put poison in Navalny’s underwear in August.
The anti-corruption activist was taken for treatment to Germany, where the labs concluded that he was poisoned with Novichok, a nervous agent designed by the Soviets.
His video accumulated more than 13 million views in 24 hours and social media teemed with memes with Navalny’s underwear.
President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman on Tuesday described Navalny as a “sick” man who suffered from “persecution delusions” and also exhibited “traces of megalomania”.
“They say he compares himself to Jesus,” said Dmitry Peskov, adding that the opposition leader had a “Freudian” fixation on his own groin.
Police arrested prominent filmmaker Vitaly Mansky on Tuesday outside the FSB headquarters in central Moscow, where he staged a demonstration by a man holding blue underwear.
The authorities also reacted against Navalny’s supporters. His main ally, Lyubov Sobol, was arrested Monday night and spent hours at a police station before being released.
Observers said it was difficult to estimate the scope of the consequences of Navalny’s claims.
“This is a political Chernobyl,” said prominent commentator Yulia Latynina, referring to the 1986 nuclear disaster in Soviet Ukraine.
“After that, the system can no longer exist in its current form,” she wrote to the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta.
Ivan Zhdanov, head of the Navalny Anti-Corruption Fund, told AFP that Navalny’s allies planned to launch a formal complaint with the FSB on Tuesday.
The FSB described the call as “fake” and said it would not have been possible without the support of foreign intelligence services.
Last week, Putin rejected reports that the FSB poisoned Navalny, saying that if the security services wanted to poison the opposition politician, “they would have taken him to the end”.
Putin, himself a former KGB officer, greeted Russia’s “brave” spies over the weekend and thanked them for protecting the country from “external and internal threats”.
Some analysts said Navalny’s claims raised new questions about the professionalism of Russia’s security services.
“Intelligence 101: always insist on calling back, never just get a call from someone you don’t know,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, president of the Munich Security Conference
This, he joked, “apparently was not being taught at FSB graduate school.”
Tuesday’s counter-sanctions were announced after Moscow summoned diplomats from Germany, France and Sweden, the three countries where labs said Navalny was poisoned with Novichok.
The findings resulted in EU sanctions against several Russian officials in October, including the head of the FSB.
A German Foreign Ministry source said the countermeasures were “unjustified”.
“We continue to ask Russia to clarify the use of a chemical weapon in Russian territory against a Russian citizen,” the source told AFP.
“Russia was not willing to do that.”
Navalny passed out during a flight from Siberia to Moscow in August.
“I said to the flight attendant and I kind of shocked him with my statement: ‘Well, I was poisoned and I’m going to die’. And I immediately lay down – standing, ” Navalny told “60 Minutes” in October.
Navalny passed out without pain, but knowing he was dying.
“In fact, every cell in your body is just saying, ‘Body, we’re done’,” he told “60 Minutes”.
He was hospitalized in Omsk before being transported to Berlin.
The person Navalny identified as an FSB agent was heard in the video saying that security services did not expect the pilot to make an emergency landing in Omsk.
He said that if the flight had continued, Navalny would not have survived.