Russia bans entry to European Parliament president and PACE special rapporteur on Navalny’s poisoning

The Russian Foreign Ministry has banned eight officials from European Union bodies and individual EU countries from entering Russia.

According to a statement released by the Foreign Ministry on Friday, April 30, this decision comes in response to the EU imposing unilateral restrictions on Russian citizens and companies. The statement underscores that six Russian citizens came under EU sanctions in March 2021. 

The list of officials banned from entering Russia includes European Parliament President David Sassoli, as well as Jacques Maire, the special rapporteur on Alexey Navalny’s poisoning at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). 

The six other sanctioned officials are as follows:

• Ivars Abolins, Chairman of Latvia’s National Electronic Mass Media Council;
• Maris Baltins, Director of Latvia’s State Language Centre;
• Jorg Raupach, Head of Berlin’s Prosecutor’s Office;
• Asa Scott, Head of the laboratory of Chemical, Biological, Radiation and Nuclear Security at Sweden’s Total Defense Research Institute;
• Ilmar Tomusk, Head of Estonia’s Language Department;
• Vera Jourova, Vice-President of the European Commission for Values and Transparency.

This practice runs counter to the UN Charter and fundamental standards of international law. It is accompanied by anti-Russia hysterics fuelled by the Western media. There are no grounds for this attitude. However, all our proposals to resolve any problems in Russia-EU relations through a direct professional dialogue are ignored or rejected.

On March 2, the European Union announced sanctions against a number of high-level Russian officials in response to the August 2020 poisoning of opposition politician Alexey Navalny.

On March 22, the EU imposed sanctions on the deputy prime minister of Russia’s Chechen Republic, along with a number of other Chechen officials, for their involvement in LGBTQ repressions and extrajudicial killings in Chechnya.