The United Kingdom announced Wednesday sanctions against six officials of the penal colony in the Russian Arctic where opponent Alexeï Navalny died, demanding that his remains be handed over “immediately” to his family and that a “transparent” investigation be carried out. ".
The director of colony No. 3 in the locality of Kharp, Vadim Kalinin, and five deputies are subject to travel bans in the United Kingdom and will see any assets on British soil frozen, the Ministry of Affairs said. foreigners in a press release.
The assets freeze prevents any UK citizen or business in the UK from dealing with funds or economic resources belonging to, held or controlled by the designated person.
It also prevents funds or economic resources from being provided to or for the benefit of the designated person.
“Brutal treatment”
“Those responsible for the brutal treatment inflicted on Navalny should have no illusions: we will hold them responsible,” declared the head of diplomacy David Cameron, quoted in the press release.
“Russian authorities clearly saw Navalny as a threat and repeatedly tried to silence him,” he added.
The British authorities denounce the living conditions of the prisoner “kept in solitary confinement for up to two weeks at a time”, forced to “walk in a temperature of -32°C”, without medical treatment.
Also read Death of Alexeï Navalny: “The chapter of the Russian political opposition is closed”
“No one should doubt the oppressive nature of the Russian system,” insisted the former British Prime Minister, who intends to take advantage of his presence at a G20 meeting in Brazil to denounce “Russian aggression” in Ukraine “directly” to of his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov.
A “complete and transparent investigation”
The United Kingdom, which had summoned a senior Russian diplomat on Friday, demanded that Navalny's body be "handed over to his family immediately" and that "a full and transparent investigation" be launched into the death of the Kremlin opponent.
London recalls having sanctioned more than 1,900 people and entities as part of the sanctions regime against Russia, including more than 1,700 since the start of the Russian invasion in Ukraine.
According to the Russian prison administration, the opponent died on February 16 in penal colony No. 3 in the locality of Kharp, a high-security prison where he had been detained since the end of 2023 and was serving a 19-year sentence for “extremism ".
According to the deceased's team, Russian investigators said on Monday that they would not return his remains for at least 14 days in order to carry out an "expertise".
After miraculously surviving a poisoning in August 2020, then being treated in Germany, Alexeï Navalny, who became popular thanks to his investigations into the corruption of Russian power, chose to return to Russia in January 2021. He was immediately arrested and sentenced successively to increasingly harsh sentences, in increasingly difficult conditions of detention, and was often locked up in the cold of an isolation cell.