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Despite the jailed anti-Putin activist Alexei Navalny largely falling out of headlines in recent months, this week State Department spokesman Ned Price featured his fate in Wednesday statements about severe human rights violations in Russian and by various other bad actors like Cuba and Belarus. Price called out the Kremlin’s “violent crackdown” against protesters seeking to highlight Navalny’s plight.

The response out of Russia was to slam Washington for its own human rights violations. The Russian Embassy in the US further trolled the State Department Spox’s Twitter account with the following…

🔻@StateDeptSpox keeps criticizing 🇷🇺 for assumed human rights violations. Meanwhile, it is high time the #US drew its attention to the internal situation. Here are some guidlines:
🔻https://t.co/ipr6yu60pl pic.twitter.com/SWQKkUOSTi

— Russian Embassy in USA 🇷🇺 (@RusEmbUSA) August 12, 2021

“Meanwhile, it’s high time the US drew its attention to the internal situation,” the embassy stated in part while linking to Russia’s own detailed review of human rights abuses around the globe, with particular focus on the United States.

The section of the document focusing on the US begins as follows:

The United States continues to grossly violate human rights both inside and outside the country, including through illegal unilateral coercive measures (sanctions), the most egregious example of which is the imposed and ongoing (despite numerous UN General Assembly resolutions) blockade of Cuba. However, this does not prevent them from positioning themselves as a “world standard” in the field of protecting fundamental freedoms. Even non-governmental organizations loyal to Washington admit that the state of affairs in the human rights sphere is getting worse here every year. At the same time, criticism about the real situation with human rights in the country is still ignored by the authorities. Instead, Washington is looking for “violations” anywhere but at home.

And there’s heavy focus on “inequality” and racial tensions which over a year ago gave rise to recent Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, unrest, and riots…

In the United States, the level of racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and other manifestations of such discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance continues to rise. In addition, the problem of racism has acquired a systemic character in American society, permeating all spheres of society. This is indicated with alarm by human rights organizations. The rapid spread of such a phenomenon that disgraces America hardly correlates with the image declared by Washington as a “global leader” in the field of protecting rights and freedoms around the world.

The lengthy document which was published by the Russian Foreign Ministry only last month takes frequent swipes at Washington, including a multitude of sarcastic quips calling out US ‘human rights hypocrisy’. It further includes a list of “very disturbing pattern” foreign policy failures by the US especially in regions like the Middle East and Central Asia.

Currently in Afghanistan US-trained national forces are in retreat amid a rapid Taliban advance while Washington is reportedly mulling the evacuation even of its embassy in Kabul, according to Politico. Russia, at the same time, is offering sales of combat helicopters to the Afghan government, in a bit of a historical ironic twist.