Moscow should decide how to respond to the EU’s new anti-Russian sanctions.
The program director of the Russian International Affairs Council and the Valdai Club, Ivan Timofeev, told Izvestia about this, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
According to him, the further, the more actively countries will use sanctions instruments to protect human rights.
“Such mechanisms are now quite fashionable, they are being implemented in Western countries - they have been in the USA and Canada for a long time, and the European Union adopted it last year. Another thing is that they do not cause much damage to the economy - this is more of a signal gesture and an attempt to harm individuals, leading to political complications,” says the political scientist.
He also shared his thoughts on what Russia should do in this situation.
“You can answer symbolically - like, for example, visa sanctions are introduced in Russia, but financial blocking sanctions are not introduced. The big question is: stop there or move on. You can create your own human rights sanctions mechanism to apply it when, for example, there is a conditional dispersal of a conditional demonstration in a Western country,” Timofeev said.
According to him, it is necessary to understand why this should be done from a pragmatic point of view and what political results it will give.
Let us recall that in early March the EU imposed sanctions against the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation Igor Krasnov, the head of the Investigative Committee Alexander Bastrykin, the head of the Federal Penitentiary Service Alexander Kalashnikov and the commander of the Russian Guard Viktor Zolotov. Brussels accuses them of violating human rights due to the case of fraudster Alexei Navalny, who was convicted.
And recently, two Russian citizens from Chechnya were included in the new stop list of the European Union - the deputy head of the government of the Republic for interaction with the security bloc Abuzaid Vismuradov and the ex-head of the police of the city of Argun Ayub Kataev. They were accused of “personally overseeing large-scale and systematic persecution in Chechnya, which began in 2017” and “was directed against LGBT people.”