A top ally of Alexei Navalny on Thursday urged Western governments to seize the assets of those close to Russian President Vladimir Putin after the opposition leader’s death.
“There are those people whom we have investigated and discovered through Navalny’s team anti-corruption investigations, those people who still have sizable assets in the West, and those people who are dear to Mr Putin,” Navalny’s chief-of-staff Leonid Volkov told EU lawmakers.
“If I dream about what the best possible response would be, that is go after Putin’s friends, seize their assets,” he said.
Navalny, an anti-corruption crusader and Putin’s leading domestic foe, died last Friday aged 47 in an Arctic prison.
His wife Yulia Navalnaya has accused Putin of murdering her husband, and US President Joe Biden said the Russian leader was “responsible” for Navalny’s death.
Navalnaya has pledged to continue her husband’s fight.
Volkov echoed the vow but said Navalny’s associates “have to take many decisions of how to carry on after this terrible loss”.
Washington has pledged fresh sanctions on Russia over the death on Friday and European diplomats say the EU is working on similar measures.
Britain on Wednesday took the lead by imposing asset freezes and visa bans on six officials at the penal colony where Navalny died.
But Volkov derided that move as ineffective, saying the officials targeted by London were never likely to travel to the UK or have assets there.
They “would only laugh about these sanctions and Putin would also laugh with them,” Volkov, who lives in exile, told a committee of European Parliament members via video link.
The European Union has already imposed unprecedented sanctions on Russia’s economy since its invasion of Ukraine two years ago and placed around 2,000 people and entities on its blacklist.
Volkov said Navalny had produced a list of Putin’s closest oligarchs to sanction in 2021, before returning to Russia after being treated abroad following his poisoning with the nerve agent Novichok.
“Yet not all of them are sanctioned, not all of their assets are frozen,” he said.
After the invasion of Ukraine, Navalny’s team also provided the EU a list of 7,000 Russian officials making up the “backbone of Putin’s system” that it said should be targeted.
“Nothing has happened. Nothing has happened,” Volkov said.
Opposition figure Vladimir Milov, a former Russian deputy energy minister, said the EU’s 2,000 sanctions listings were “nothing” and the bloc needed to target lower-ranking officials.
“They think that sanctions are only about those bosses on top, and we who work in the second or third tier of the government can continue being involved and complicit in Putin crimes,” he said.
