EU ponders future of gloomy ties with Russia

BRUSSELS (AP) — European Union officials on Monday pondered the future of the bloc's troubled relations with Russia amid deep concern that their large eastern neighbor sees democracy as a threat and wants to distance itself further from the EU.

The state of ties took a turn for the worse on Friday after Russia said that it was expelling diplomats from Sweden, Poland and Germany, accusing them of attending a rally in support of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most high-profile political foe.

Beyond its diplomatic repercussions, the decision was as a slap in the face for the EU because it came as the 27-nation bloc’s top diplomat — foreign policy chief Josep Borrell — was meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Borrell said he learned about the move on social media.

“The messages sent by Russian authorities during this visit confirmed that Europe and Russia are drifting apart,” Borrell wrote in a blog on his return to Brussels. “It seems that Russia is progressively disconnecting itself from Europe and looking at democratic values as an existential threat.”

He said the trip left him “with deep concerns over the perspectives of development of Russian society and Russia’s geostrategic choices,” and the expulsions, which he requested be dropped, “indicate that the Russian authorities did not want to seize this opportunity to have a more constructive dialogue.”

Some EU lawmakers criticized Borrell for going, or for not insisting on visiting Navalny, who was arrested in January when he returned to Moscow after spending months in Germany recovering from a poisoning in Russia with what experts say was the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok.

Borrell tried to arrange a prison meeting through Lavrov, but...