WASHINGTON, August 20. /TASS/. The United States imposes sanctions against nine Russian individuals, including officers of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), and four Russian entities that, in Washington’s opinion, were involved in the incident with blogger Alexey Navalny, the US Department of State said in a press release on Friday.
The Department of State points out that the sanctions will target nine Russian individuals and four entities. According to Washington, the entities "have engaged in activities to develop Russia’s chemical weapons capabilities."
As a results of Friday’s sanctions, their property in the United States will be blocked and any dealings with the US nationals or companies prohibited.
The sanctions are slapped on the FSB Criminalistics Institute and the State Scientific and Research and Testing Institute of Military Medicine. Apart from them, the new restrictions are imposed on the 33rd Scientific Research and Testing Institute and the 27th Scientific Center of the Russian Defense Ministry, which were blacklisted earlier.
The US Treasury says in its press release that Alexei Sedov, the Chief of the FSB’s Service for the Protection of the Constitutional System and the Fight against Terrorism, Kirill Vasiliev, Director of the FSB Criminalistics Institute, Stanislav Makshakov and Konstantin Kudryavtsev, operatives of the FSB Criminalistics Institute, Vladimir Bogdanov, Chief of the FSB’s Special Technology Center, and FSB officers Alexey Alexandrov, Ivan Osipov and Vladimir Panyaev are sanctioned, along with Artur Zhirov, who, as the press release claims, is the former director of the 27th Scientific Center of the Russian Defense Ministry.
Earlier on Friday, London had sanctioned seven FSB officers, who are believed to be involved in the incident with blogger Alexey Navalny.
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.