Ursula von der Leyen
The head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, compared the situation with Alexei Navalny to the poisoning of a former GRU officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter in British Salisbury. She spoke about this at the plenary session of the European Parliament.
In her opinion, Navalny's intoxication resembles the attempt on the Skripals' life. Von der Leyen believes that “this behavior of the Russian authorities will not change.”
“We saw the same picture earlier in Georgia and Ukraine, in Syria and Salisbury, as well as with interference in elections around the world. This template will not change, and no gas pipeline will change anything in it, ”she said.
Earlier, von der Leyen said that the European Commission has practically developed a sanctions regime similar to the Magnitsky Act. The European Union began work on creating its own package of sanctions, similar to the Magnitsky Act adopted in the United States, back in December 2019.
The association was going to impose restrictions on violations in the field of human rights. The development of the project was resumed after the hospitalization of Alexei Navalny: he felt sick on the morning of August 20 during a flight from Tomsk to Moscow, the plane urgently landed in Omsk. On August 22, the oppositionist was taken to a Berlin clinic.
The German authorities announced the poisoning of a Russian citizen with the poison of the Novichok group. Russian doctors claim that the tests did not show the presence of any poisons in Navalny's body. The head physician of the Omsk ambulance hospital No. 1, Alexander Murakhovsky, claimed that the patient had a carbohydrate balance disorder.
Similar American laws have also been adopted in Estonia, Canada, Lithuania and Latvia. In the UK, only part of the law has been passed – it concerns the freezing of assets of those involved in gross violations of human rights. American law was named after Russian auditor Sergei Magnitsky. He was arrested in 2008, in 2009 he died in the Moscow SIZO “Matrosskaya Tishina”.
