The National Security and Defense Council on Sept. 17 imposed sanctions on 86 Russians involved in the Russian parliamentary election being held on the occupied territory of Crimea and the Donbas.
The list includes 33 State Duma (Russian parliament) candidates and 53 Russian territorial electoral commission members overseeing the 2021 Russian parliamentary election that is taking place on Sept. 17-19.
The list of sanctioned individuals will be further expanded, the Security Council Secretary Oleksiy Danilov said during a briefing on Sept. 17.
These are the latest in a raft of sanctions applied by the Security Council against Russia following its invasion of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in March 2014, as well as its ongoing military, diplomatic and financial backing of separatists in the Donbas region.
The Security Council also sanctioned seven agents of Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, for their involvement in the 2020 poisoning of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny.
The move follows similar sanctions applied earlier in 2021 by the U.S. and U.K. governments, as well as the European Union.
Navalny, who leads the Russia for the Future Party, was poisoned with nerve agent Novichok, developed in Soviet and Russian state-run laboratories, in the Siberian city of Tomsk on Aug. 20, 2020.
International suspicion immediately fell on the Russian government, which had previously used Novichok in a failed March 2018 assassination attempt on Sergei Skripal, a former British double agent within the FSB who was imprisoned in Russia in 2004 but released to reside in the U.K. following a spy swap in 2010.
After British intelligence services released evidence of two FSB agents being involved in the assassination attempt on British soil, which killed a bystander and hospitalized three people including Skripal, the U.K., U.S. and EU applied sanctions against Russia.
This added to the sanctions taken by all three actors against Russia in the wake of the Crimea invasion, which the Atlantic Council estimated in May 2021 to have cost Russia $50 billion a year in lost growth.
Navalny spent a month in a specialized Berlin clinic after the poisoning. On Jan. 17, 2021, he returned to Moscow, where he was arrested at Vnukovo airport immediately after his arrival.
Russian President Vladimir Putin denied that his government was behind the poisoning, saying that if his security services wanted to kill Navalny, they would have “finished” the job.
In December 2020, investigative outlet Bellingcat released a recording of a phone call in which Navalny duped FSB officer Konstantin Kudryavtsev into admitting that Novichok had been applied to Navalny’s underwear by FSB agents, but had been absorbed by his skin too slowly to have its intended effect of killing the opposition politician.
Navalny is the most prominent opposition figure in Russian politics, but he is viewed with a degree of suspicion in Ukraine owing to his October 2014 comments that he would not return occupied Crimea to Ukraine if he had the power to do so, advising Ukrainians “not to deceive themselves.”
