MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that Russia must ensure that its parliamentary vote scheduled for September is free from foreign interference following mass protests for which one of its fiercest critics should be released.
Tens of thousands of people took to the streets last month to urge Russia to free Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny ahead of the September election. The 44-year-old opposition politician was detained and later jailed for alleged parole violations on his return to Russia. He was treated in Germany for a nerve agent poisoning he contracted in Siberia last August.
The Kremlin has suggested that Navalny is a CIA asset used by Western intelligence services to destabilize Russia, and Moscow has repeatedly urged the European Union to stay out of its internal affairs.
Russia itself is accused of interfering in several elections abroad, including in the US presidential vote in 2016.
“The citizens of Russia will make their choice (during the parliamentary elections), and we must defend this choice against attempts at external interference,” Putin said during a televised meeting with the leaders of the political parties in the State Duma. house of parliament.
“We can not allow any attack on Russia’s sovereignty, on the right of our people to be the master of their land,” he said, without determining which countries he was referring to.
Navalny said last year he thought Russian intelligence services had poisoned him with a nerve agent because authorities saw him as a threat ahead of the parliamentary elections.
The Kremlin has rejected any suggestion that Putin or the authorities have anything to do with Navalny’s poisoning.
Some European countries have called for sanctions against Moscow over the Navalny case, including halting construction of the underwater Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which is designed to export gas from Russia to Germany by Ukraine bypass.
Putin accuses the countries that have called for sanctions against the project for trying to use Nord Stream 2 as a tool to punish Russia.
“Why is everyone circling around Nord Steam 2?” Putin said.
“They (Western countries) want to force Russia to pay for their geopolitical project in Ukraine,” he added, referring to the conflict that erupted in the east of the country following Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
(Reporting by Maria Kiselyova and Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber; Edited by Bernadette Baum)