In a Facebook posting today, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova charged that an online meeting yesterday organized by Poland’s EU mission in Brussels, including two top aides to Russian “dissident” Alexey Navalny, as well as representatives of the EU, the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Ukraine, was in fact a gathering of NATO countries to deliver “instructions” to the Navalny crew on how to carry out subversive activities against the government of President Vladimir Putin. Zakharova elaborated further in statements to Vesti FB Radio that the fact that EU or U.S. sanctions or other reprisals against Russia were discussed in yesterday’s meeting with Navalny’s supporters is, in moral and ethical terms, a “betrayal of Russia”—an effort to enforce Russia’s containment.
“Everything is pretty simple,” Zakharova said. The Feb. 8 meeting organized by Poland’s permanent mission to the EU “held an online meeting involving [Leonid] Volkov and [Vladimir] Ashurkov,” top Navalny lieutenants, together with representatives of the above-named countries. In fact, she said, “it was a meeting of the NATO countries. They gave instructions to the ‘opposition’ members—who are actually their agents of influence—on how they should be more cunning in their future subversive activities.” So, she concluded, “there you go, this is what our so-called Western partners are doing, thereby continuing their absolutely illegal, wrongful and aggressive offensive against us.”
