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| - Russia's foreign ministry said Friday it had barred eight European officials from entering the country in response to EU sanctions against Russian officials last month. The ministry said it was responding to sanctions imposed by the European Council last month against four top Russian security officials over the jailing of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny and a violent police response to protests in his support. "The European Union continues its policy of unilateral illegitimate restrictive measures targeting Russian citizens and organisations," the ministry said in a statement. "Such actions by the European Union leave no doubt that their true goal is to restrain the development of our country at any cost," it added. "To throw an overt challenge to the independence of Russian foreign and domestic policy." The Russian foreign ministry's list of European officials barred from Russia include European Parliament President David Sassoli and officials from France and Germany, as well as Baltic states Estonia and Latvia. One of Latvian officials, Ivars Abolins, in February supported his country's decision to drop several Russian television channels. Another official on the list, Asa Scott of the Swedish Defence Research Agency, helped confirm last year that Navalny was poisoned by the Soviet-era Novichok nerve toxin in August. The opposition figure says the poisoning was orchestrated by Russian President Vladimir Putin, a claim the Kremlin denies. Navalny's arrest on his return to Russia in January from Germany, where he had spent months recovering the poisoning, has helped plunge Moscow's relations with the West to near Cold War levels. The European Union and the United States have imposed a series of sanctions on Russia over the poisoning and jailing of the critic. Navalny, 44, is serving a two-and-a-half year sentence in a penal colony outside Moscow for violating parole terms on old fraud charges that he says are politically motivated. emg/jv
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