Navalni poisoning | The US sanctions four agents for their role in the poisoning of Russian opponent Alexei Navalni

2023-08-17 22:17:34

The United States Department of the Treasury has announced this Thursday new sanctions against four individuals who collaborated with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and played an important role in the poisoning of the Russian opponent Alexei Navalny with a Novichok-type nerve agent in the summer of 2020.

“The assassination attempt against Alexei Navalni in 2020 represents the Kremlin’s contempt for human rights, and we will continue to use the authorities at our disposal to hold the Kremlin’s executioners to account,” the Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism said in a statement. and Financial Intelligence, Brian E. Nelson.

For his part, the spokesman for the United States Department of State, Matthew Miller, again condemned this Thursday in a statement the sentence of 19 years in prison for extremism against the Russian opponent, which he has branded as “injustice”. “We renew our call for his immediate release,” she assured.

Specifically, Washington has added to its ‘black list’ Alexei Alexandrovich Alexandrov, an agent of the FSB’s Institute of Criminalistics, “one of the main” responsible for the poisoning of the Russian opponent and who, in addition, spied on the activist Nikita Isaev, who died, under suspicious conditions, from cardiac arrest during a train journey in 2019.

Likewise, the sanctions also extend to Konstantin Kudriavtsev, who also belongs to the previously named Institute and came to admit his participation in cleanup operations after Navalni was intoxicated with a nerve agent.

Kudriavtsev was responsible for spying on Russian opponent and journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza, sentenced by a Moscow court to 25 years in prison for various crimes, including high treason, a sentence harshly criticized by the international community.

Finally, the United States has sanctioned Ivan Vladimirovich Osipov, who was part of the team to carry out the poisoning, and Vladimir Alexandrovich Panyaev, who was in charge of spying on Navalni on multiple occasions.

the russian opponent fell seriously ill in August 2020 while returning on a return flight to Moscow after campaigning in Tomsk and Novosibirsk, which caused an emergency landing in the Siberian town of Omsk, where he was admitted to the ICU in a coma with assisted breathing.

Later, he was evacuated on a medicalized plane chartered by the NGO Cinema for Peace to Berlin, where he remained in the intensive care unit in an induced coma. Medical staff later confirmed in a report that Navalni was poisoned with Novichok, a chemical that was already used in 2018 against former agent Sergei Skripal in the UK and whose trail leads to Russia, which has denied it.