Norway To Join EU Sanctions Against Russia Over Navalny Case - Foreign Ministry

Norway is going to join the European Union's sanctions against Russia over the incident involving Alexey Navalny's poisoning, Norwegian Foreign Minister Ine Eriksen Soreide told national NRK broadcaster on Thursday

MURMANSK (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 15th October, 2020) Norway is going to join the European Union's sanctions against Russia over the incident involving Alexey Navalny's poisoning, Norwegian Foreign Minister Ine Eriksen Soreide told national NRK broadcaster on Thursday.

Today the EU is expected to release the list of individuals and organizations to be hit by sanctions over their alleged involvement in Navalny's poisoning. Sputnik has learned from an EU source that the list will include six persons and one organization and be similar in its premises to the one compiled over the poisoning of ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the UK town of Salisbury in 2018.

"Norway will join the EU measures pertaining to the use of chemical weapons," Soreide said in an email to the broadcaster, adding that Oslo would also support the content of the sanctions list.

On Monday, the EU foreign ministers agreed to impose sanctions over the Navalny case, with Germany and France submitting concrete proposals on who should be on the list.

Navalny fully recovered from the suspected poisoning with a military-grade nerve agent and was let go from the Berlin-based Charite hospital on September 23, a month since his original hospitalization.

The 44-year-old was hospitalized with suspected poisoning in the Siberian city of Omsk after feeling unwell during a domestic flight on August 20. Russian doctors found no traces of poisons in Navalny's samples and suggested he could have suffered an abrupt drop of glucose in his blood due to metabolic disbalance.

Two days later, the man was flown to Germany for further treatment under medically-induced coma. The German government claimed on September 2 that it had found traces of a Novichok group nerve agent in his samples.

Russia has demanded that Germany provide evidence and make case materials available to Russian investigators. At Moscow's request, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) sent a technical mission to assist the Russian investigation. Last week, OPCW confirmed Navalny's samples contained traces of a toxic substance, albeit not one registered by the organization as prohibited.

The man himself is convinced that the Kremlin is behind his poisoning. Russia has slammed the whole case as a plotted conspiracy theory, pointing to multiple inconsistencies in Berlin's statements and the extreme politicization of the OPCW.