If he ever becomes president, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalniy will have to give back Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula he once likened to a “sandwich,” Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said in an interview with the Ukraina 24 TV channel on Jan. 24.
“I am sure that he would have to give back the sandwich. Not bitten but fresh and in good condition,” Kuleba said.
In an October 2014 interview with the Echo of Moscow radio station, Navalny outraged many Ukrainians by applying the highly controversial metaphor to Crimea.
When asked whether Russia must return Crimea, which it seized from Ukraine in February 2014, Navalny said that despite the annexation being illegal, Ukraine had lost the peninsula for good.
“Crimea is now a part of the Russian Federation. Let’s not fool ourselves. And I advise Ukrainians not to fool themselves either. Crimea will remain part of Russia and will never become part of Ukraine in the foreseeable future,” said Navalny.
“Is Crimea a sausage sandwich or something, so it can be handed back and forth? I don’t think so.”
Ukraine is suing Russia in international courts over Crimea’s annexation and has demanded the peninsula’s return.
“We must not be charmed by Alexei Navalny when we are talking about Ukrainian interests,” Kuleba said.
He added that Navalny would have to apologize for the annexation if he becomes a national leader or gets a high-level role in Russian politics.
On Jan. 17, Navalny, the most outspoken critic of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, returned to Moscow from Berlin, where he spent nearly five months recovering from a nerve agent poisoning orchestrated by Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) agents.
Law enforcers had Navalny’s plane rerouted to a different Moscow airport and arrested him immediately after he landed. Russian officials claimed Navalny had violated probation terms from a suspended sentence in an earlier case against him.
He was accused of money laundering and financial fraud involving Yves Rocher, a global cosmetics producer. Despite Navalny winning the case in the European Court of Human Rights in 2017, Russia’s court did not lift the accusations against him.
After Navalny was arrested, around 150,000 people all across Russia took to the streets demanding his release.
Over 3,000 protesters, including 195 children, have been detained. This is the largest number of detentions in the history of Putin’s presidency, according to human rights organizations.
Ukraine is calling for Navalny’s release, said Kuleba.
“An enemy of my enemy is my friend,” he said. “If Alexei Navalny is an enemy of Vladimir Putin, then we support Alexei Navalny. Simple as that.”
