On Tuesday, Russia imposed sanctions on EU officials over their response to the poisoning Alexey Navalny, saying the opposition leader has a complex of persecution and “compares himself to Jesus”. Moscow has summoned several senior EU diplomats before announcing the new travel bans in response to the bloc’s “confrontational” sanctions in October.
The foreign ministry said Moscow had “decided to extend the list of representatives of member states and EU institutions who would be denied entry into Russia.”
The announcement came a day after Navalny, 44, said he had replaced an official in the Kremlin Security Council and extracted a guilty plea from a toxin expert with the FSB security service.
In a video of the conversation published by Navalny, the alleged FSB agent says that the agents put poison in Navalny’s underwear in August.
The anti-corruption activist was transported to Germany for treatment, where laboratories concluded that he had been poisoned with Novichok, a Soviet nerve agent.
His video garnered over 13 million views in 24 hours, and social media was full of memes with Navalny’s panties.
President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman described Navalny on Tuesday as a “patient” suffering from “illusions of persecution” and also described “traits of megalomania.”
“He is said to be compared to Jesus,” said Dmitry Peskov, adding that the opposition leader had a “Freudian” fixation on his own feet.
Police on Tuesday detained filmmaker Vitaly Mansky in front of the FSB headquarters in central Moscow, where he organized a rally with a single man holding a pair of blue panties.
Authorities also attacked Navalny’s supporters. His main ally Lyubov Sobol was detained late Monday and spent hours at a police station before being released.
Observers said it was difficult to estimate how far the consequences of Navalny’s claims would be.
“This is a political Chernobyl,” said prominent commentator Yulia Latynina, referring to the 1986 nuclear disaster in Soviet Ukraine.
“After that, the system cannot exist in its current form,” she wrote in the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta.
Ivan Zhdanov, head of Navalny’s anti-corruption fund, told AFP that Navalny’s allies plan to launch an official complaint to the FSB on Tuesday.
The FSB described the phone 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 had poisoned Navalny, saying that if the security services had wanted to poison the opposition politician, “he would have taken him to the end.”
Putin, a former KGB officer himself, greeted Russia’s “brave” spies over the weekend and thanked them for protecting the country from “external and internal threats.”
Some analysts said that Navalny’s statements raised new questions about the professionalism of Russia’s security services.
“Intelligence 101: always insist on calling back, never take a call from someone you don’t recognize,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, president of the Munich Security Conference
He joked, “apparently he was not taught in the FSB graduate school.”
Tuesday’s sanctions were announced after Moscow summoned diplomats from Germany, France and Sweden, the three countries where laboratories said Navalny had been poisoned by Novichok.
The findings led to EU sanctions against several Russian officials in October, including the head of the FSB.
A German Foreign Ministry source said the contrary measures were “unjustified”.
“We continue to call on Russia to clarify the use of a chemical weapon on Russian territory against a Russian citizen,” the source told AFP.
“Russia has shown no desire to do so.”
Navalny crashed during a flight from Siberia to Moscow in August.
“I told my flight attendant and shocked him with my statement, ‘Well, I’ve been poisoned and I’m going to die.’ And I immediately lay down on … at his feet, ” Navalny said “60 minutes” in October.
Navalny collapsed painlessly, but knowing he was dying.
“In fact, every cell in your body just tells you, ‘Body, I’m done,'” he said, “60 minutes.”
He was interned 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 been allowed to continue, Navalny would not have survived.