Borrell to meet Lavrov, while Navalny behind bars

“I don’t share the opinion that when things go bad, you don’t talk. On the contrary,” he said.

Borrell is to meet foreign minister Sergei Lavrov at one of his official buildings on Spiridonovka Street in Moscow on 5 February, while Navalny is being held in the ‘Matrosskaya Tishina’ prison, a few kilometres away.

“I will be very happy to see Mr. Navalny,” if the Russians allowed it, Borrell said.

But “you don’t do things this way,” Borrell also said, when asked if he would make his trip conditional on meeting the prisoner of conscience.

Eight EU countries, including Denmark, Lithuania, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland, had previously spoken of targeted EU sanctions over Navalny.

But Borrell also ruled those out for now.

“There’s no fixed date, no schedule, for what the European Council will do [on sanctions]. It depends on what happens,” he said.

“We have agreed today to wait [on sanctions] for the [Russian] court’s decision, to wait to see … whether Alexei Navalny is set free after 30 days,” German foreign minister Heiko Maas also told press in Brussels the same day.

The EU has urged Russia to free Navalny and the 3,500 people it arrested at pro-Navalny protests last Saturday.

But the main point of the Moscow talks would be to discuss “strategic” issues, ahead of an EU leaders’ debate on wider Russia relations in March, Borrell noted.

“Such a trip is long overdue,” Russia’s ambassador to the EU, Vladimir Chizhov, also told EUobserver.

“Political dialogue” was “all the more required given the current political situation in Russia-EU relations and the obvious need to talk more with each other, rather than about each other,” Chizhov said on Monday.

He listed the Western Balkans, the Middle East, North Africa, Iran nuclear arms, and wars in the South Caucasus as the big issues.

But behind the scenes in Monday’s EU talks, some foreign ministers voiced worries that Borrell’s trip could turn into a fiasco, if Russia decided to engineer one.

If all Borrell got was a handshake with Lavrov, then the Russian court jailed Navalny for several years after the EU diplomat went home, “it wouldn’t look good”, an EU source said.

And even if Borrell met Navalny, it might make EU-Russia diplomacy look strange, a second EU source added.

“That would be Russia’s new game with us: to let Navalny out of his cage so that Western politicians can get a good pic for Twitter,” the source said.

Navalny was poisoned by Putin’s FSB spy service using a UN-banned chemical weapon last year, the EU has said.

He was arrested on bogus charges when he returned from Moscow to Berlin, prompting the largest street protests in Russia for 10 years.

And Putin personally denied Navalny’s latest corruption revelation – that he owned an opulent palace near the Black Sea – in a TV interview on Monday.

It “has never belonged to me or my close relatives,” Putin said.

Change?

“The Kremlin is afraid that change is in the air. And Navalny, who almost died after being poisoned, symbolises the change that is expected by the people,” Lithuanian foreign minister Gabrielius Landsbergis told EUobserver the same day.

“We must react decisively to his [Navalny’s] detention,” he said.

Some EU politicians have also urged Germany to stop building a new gas pipeline with Russia, called Nord stream 2, in response to recent events.

And Navalny has urged the West to freeze the assets of Putin’s financial sponsors.

But for its part, the World Economic Forum (WEF), an elite Swiss think-tank, has also invited Putin to address its so-called ‘virtual Davos’ event this year, adding to Europe’s air of business-as-usual.

“The motto of the WEF is ‘Improving the state of the world’. Seems like legitimising Putin does just the opposite,” Bill Browder, a British financier and human rights campaigner, who usually attends Davos events, said.