The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russian Federation, represented by Sergey Lavrov, the Head of the Ministry, imposed sanctions against Germany and France on the case of Alexey Navalny. This information was reported by the Russian News Agency (TASS) on November 12, 2020.
On November 12, 2020, Sergey Lavrov, head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, held a press conference with Russian and foreign media on topical issues on the international agenda. During the interview, a foreign journalist was asked about the Navalny case, as a result of which, France and Germany imposed sanctions against Russia.
Russian news Agency (TASS) reports that Russia is introducing retaliatory (“mirror”) sanctions against Germany and France because of the “Navalny case”. This was announced by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at a press conference with the media.
European Union, represented by Germany and France, imposed sanctions against Russian Federation on the Navalny case: this applies to six individuals and the research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology. The document notes that the sanctions were imposed for violation of the Convention on the prohibition of chemical weapons. The sanctions are published in the official Journal of the European Union on October 15, 2020.
To check whether the information published by TASS is reliable, we turned to Russian Foreign Ministry official website , but did not find any regulations or instructions related to the establishment of sanctions against Germany and France. On the TASS portal, the material contains a video from a press conference in which Sergey Lavrov explains the situation that happened to the Director of the anti-corruption Fund Alexey Navalny, but it also does not contain information that Russia is imposing sanctions against the two mentioned countries. The article quotes the head of the Foreign Ministry: “They (sanctions) have already been adopted. We will soon inform our German and French colleagues about this. These sanctions will be imposed on senior employees of the offices of the leaders of Germany and France,” Lavrov said. But no official document was published.
Thus, we can conclude that the statement published on the Internet portal of the TASS news Agency is mostly false, since it is possible that the official document has not yet been published for some reason.
Article / Research © Alyona Rozna, South Ural State University
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