Alexej Navalny: Why Russia is imposing sanctions on Germany

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It was probably the most spectacular action by the Russian oppositionist Alexei Navalny.

On Monday, he posted a video on YouTube that received 13 million views in just one day.

In the recording you can hear him talking on the phone to a suspected agent of the Russian domestic intelligence service FSB, who admits Navalny's poisoning in August.

The Kremlin critic, who is in Germany after his treatment at the Berlin Charité, pretended to be the assistant of a high-ranking secret service agent on the phone.

According to his own account, he was able to engage the man in a conversation lasting almost an hour and ask about the details of the FSB operation that was aimed at his poisoning.

Navalny had collapsed on a domestic flight in Siberia in August.

The findings of several western laboratories later showed that the agent Novichok was present in his organism.

The alleged FSB man said in the now published phone call that the poison was attached to the inside of Nawalny's underpants.

The 44-year-old opposition member probably only survived because the flight did not last long enough and paramedics took care of him so quickly, the man said.

When Navalny collapsed, the pilot brought the plane to the ground in Omsk, where the Kremlin opponent was taken to the hospital.

Such a “chain of events” is “the worst factor that can happen in our work,” said the man on the phone.

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If that is true, it would be a new embarrassment for Vladimir Putin's secret services after the publication of the research platform Bellingcat last week, which outlined longstanding attempts by Moscow to poison Navalny.

The opposition officials accuse no one other than Putin himself of having commissioned his assassination.

However: Navalny is not primarily a domestic political problem for the Kremlin.

With repressive methods and election manipulation, Putin has had the country's political life firmly under control - so far.

So the Russian president can afford to openly admit, as he did recently in his press conference, that Navalny is being monitored by secret services.

At the same time, Putin downplayed its meaning: “If you wanted to murder him, you would have done it”.

"If you had wanted to poison the Berlin patient, that would have been pulled through"

After weeks of retreat, Russia's President Putin has now presented himself to the national and international media at his annual press conference.

He also mentioned Navalny, whom he only calls the “Berlin patient”.

Source: WORLD

However, the Navalny affair has now reached a much larger dimension.

From the perspective of the Russian state, there cannot and must not be any independent politicians in the country who question Putin's power.

So for the Kremlin, Navalny is nothing more than a tool used by foreign actors who pursue the goal of interfering in internal affairs of Russia and "destabilizing" the country, as the Russian secret service agents use their favorite word.

Since Navalny does all of this from Germany, it also has consequences for Moscow's relationship with the West - and especially with Germany.

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So it is no wonder that the Kremlin has responded appropriately to Navalny's recent revelation.

Putin's spokesman Dmitri Peskov accused this on Tuesday of “delusions of persecution and megalomania”, and that the opposition party compares “as you can hear” with Jesus Christ.

But the actual addressees of these statements are in Western European government headquarters.

The heads of the diplomatic missions of Germany, France and Sweden in Moscow were invited to the Russian Foreign Ministry for a meeting on Tuesday.

Institutes in these three countries had stated that after the attack on Navalny, traces of poisoning with a chemical nerve agent from the Novichok group were found.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) confirmed the findings.

The Russian Foreign Ministry announced that the meeting was about new EU sanctions against Russia.

The diplomats had been given a corresponding verbal note.

The state news agency even published a video showing the diplomats rushing out of their limousines - as if to emphasize the special urgency.

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Shortly thereafter, the ministry announced that it would react to “unfriendly steps” by the European Union - that is, sanctions against the heads of the alleged poisoners Navalnys - by expanding its “black list”, which was supplemented by “promoters of sanctioning activities” against Russia should.

Those on the list are not allowed to enter Russia.

Unlike the EU sanctions list, the list is not public.

Dialogue seems impossible

Moscow had already announced such a step in September after Brussels had imposed sanctions against, among others, the first deputy chief of the presidential administration, Sergei Kiriyenko, the domestic intelligence chief Alexander Bortnikow and two deputy defense ministers.

The reactions from Moscow show that a dialogue on the Navalny case offers little prospect of understanding - or is even impossible.

In his latest press conference, Vladimir Putin spoke of Navalny's alleged involvement with Western intelligence services.

The desire to clarify the poisoning case, as it is expressed in European capitals, is not only impossible from a Russian point of view - it is a "provocation", still a favorite word of Russian government agencies.

After all, it is about Navalny, whom Moscow accuses, among other things, of "calls to overthrow state power," as spokesman Peskov recently said.

The latest developments in the Navalny case could mean a lasting burden for German-Russian relations.

Chancellor Angela Merkel made it clear how important the opposition politician is for official Berlin with her visit to Nawalny.

He has announced that he wants to return to Russia.

But now he is much more than a protagonist of research that exposes the Russian secret services.

With the video, Navalny makes Putin's most important instrument of power a target for scorn and ridicule.

The Kremlin will not forgive him for that.

Navalny, his family and his colleagues have been exposed to state reprisals for years, which are now likely to increase.

If he returned to Russia, the opposition could end up behind bars, for example for treason - the Russian security authorities would not have to look long for alleged evidence of this.

If Navalny now stays in Germany and becomes an opposition in exile, little may change for him.

He reaches most of his followers with YouTube videos anyway.

But for Berlin this would mean that the Federal Republic of Putin's intimate enemy, whose name the Russian President is careful not to pronounce, would grant asylum.

This would make Germany a place from where the Putin critic Navalny can go about his work undisturbed - from Russia's point of view with the blessing of the German government.

For the more recent relations between the two countries, this would be a novelty with unpredictable consequences.