Russia on Tuesday imposed sanctions on European Union officials over their response to the poisoning of Alexey Navalny, saying that the opposition leader had a persecution complex and “compares himself to Jesus.” Moscow convened several senior EU diplomats before issuing the new travel bans in response to what it said were “confrontational” sanctions imposed by the bloc in October.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Moscow “has decided to expand the list of representatives of EU Member States and institutions that are being refused entry to Russia.”
The announcement came a day after Navalny, 44, said he had checked himself out as an official on the Kremlin Security Council and extracted a confession of guilt from a toxin expert from the FSB Security Service.
In a video of the conversation published by Navalny, the alleged FSB agent says agents put poison in Navalny’s underwear in August.
The anti-corruption activist was flown to Germany for treatment, where laboratories concluded that he had been poisoned with Novichok, a nerve agent designed by the Soviet Union.
His video has been viewed over 13 million times in 24 hours and social media is buzzing with memes wearing Navalny’s underpants.
President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman on Tuesday described Navalny as a “sick” man who suffered from “delusions of persecution” and also displayed “features of megalomania”.
“They say he compares himself to Jesus,” said Dmitry Peskov, adding that the opposition leader had a “Freudian” fixation on his own cross.
Police later on Tuesday detained prominent filmmaker Vitaly Mansky outside FSB headquarters in central Moscow, where he hosted a one-man meeting wearing blue underpants.
Authorities also retaliated against Navalny’s supporters. His closest ally Lyubov Sobol was detained late on Monday and spent hours in a police station before being released.
Observers said it was difficult to gauge how far-reaching the ramifications 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 this, the system can no longer exist in its current form,” she wrote in the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta.
Ivan Zhdanov, the head of Navalny’s anti-corruption fund, told AFP that Navalny’s allies planned to file a formal complaint with the FSB on Tuesday.
The FSB has described the call as “bogus” 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 forces had wanted to poison the opposition politician, “they would have made it to the end.”
Putin, himself a former KGB officer, last weekend praised Russia’s “courageous” spies 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 the Russian security services.
“Intelligence 101: always insist on calling back, never just take a call from someone you don’t recognize,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the Munich Security Conference.
This, he joked, was “apparently not taught at FSB graduate school.”
Tuesday’s counter-sanctions were announced after Moscow summoned diplomats from Germany, France and Sweden, the three countries where laboratories have said Navalny had been poisoned with Novichok.
The findings resulted in EU sanctions against several Russian officials in October, including the head of the FSB.
A source from Germany’s Foreign Ministry said the countermeasures were “not justified”.
“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 willingness to do this.”
Navalny collapsed in August on a flight from Siberia to Moscow.
“I said to the flight attendant, and I shocked him a bit with my statement, ‘Well, I was poisoned and I’m dying.’ And I immediately got up … on his feet, ” Navalny told “60 Minutes” in October.
Navalny collapsed without pain, but knew he was dying.
“Basically every cell of your body is just telling you, ‘Body, we’re done,'” he told “60 minutes.”
He was admitted to Omsk before being transported to Berlin.
The person who identified Navalny as an FSB agent was heard in the video that the security forces did not expect the pilot to make an emergency landing in Omsk.
He said that if the flight could have gone ahead, Navalny would not have survived.