LONDON, August 20. /TASS/. London has imposed sanctions against seven officers of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), who are believed to be involved in the incident with blogger Alexey Navalny, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said in a sanctions list released on Friday.
The document says that Alexei Sedov, the chief of the FSB service for the protection of the constitutional system and the fight against terrorism, Kirill Vasilyev, Director of the FSB Criminalistics Institute, Stanislav Makshakov, an employee of the FSB Criminalistics Institute, Vladimir Bogdanov, chief of the FSB specialized equipment center, and FSB officers Alexei Aleksandrov (also known, according to London, as Frolov), Ivan Spiridonov (or Osipov) and Vladimir Panyaev are sanctioned, which means their bank accounts are frozen and they are barred from entering the country.
It is the second round of sanctions that London has slapped on Russia following the incident with Navalny. Last October, the UK sanctioned six Russian individuals. Among them were First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office Sergei Kiriyenko and FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov.
Alexey Navalny was rushed to a local hospital in the Siberian city of Omsk on August 20, 2020, after collapsing on a Moscow-bound flight from Tomsk. He fell into a coma and was put on a ventilator in an intensive care unit. On August 22, he was airlifted to Berlin and admitted to the Charite hospital. On September 2, the German government claimed that the blogger had been affected by a toxic agent belonging to the Novichok family. According to Berlin, the conclusions were substantiated by French and Swedish laboratories.
Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov has reiterated that Moscow stays ready for comprehensive cooperation with Germany and pointed out that no poisonous substances had been detected in Navalny’s system prior to his transfer to Berlin.