Navalny, who fell ill on a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow last month, is being treated at a hospital in Berlin.
German government spokesman Stefan Seibert said toxicological tests on samples taken from Navalny were carried out at a German military laboratory. He said he provided “clear evidence of a chemical nerve agent” from the Novichok group.
In a statement, Seibert said it was “shocking” that “the novel was attacked in Russia with a chemical nerve agent.”
“The federal government condemns this attack in the strongest possible terms,” the statement said. In addition, the Russian government has been asked to provide an explanation for the incident.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that the Kremlin had not received any information from Germany that Navalny had been poisoned by a substance from the Novichok group, according to the state news agency Tass on Sunday.
Russia’s foreign ministry said it was awaiting a German response to the Russian prosecutor general’s request for treatment and diagnosis of the novel, Tass reported.
Seibert said German Chancellor Angela Merkel discussed Navalny’s case with ministers early Wednesday and that the government would inform the European Union, NATO and the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons about the results of the investigation.
The German government concluded in a statement: “We hope to have Alexei Navalny fully recovered.”
Well known Kremlin critic
The 44-year-old Naval, a prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, fell ill on August 20 on his way from Siberia to Moscow.
In the dramatic video footage from the plane, a man was seen in apparent pain.
The flight made an emergency landing in Omsk, and Navalny was transferred to a hospital there, before his wife and supporters requested that he be taken to Germany for treatment.
The anti-corruption blogger was brought to Berlin on August 22 and taken to the city’s Charita Hospital, where he is believed to be in an induced coma.
Following the German government’s announcement on Wednesday, Navalny’s chief of staff Leonid Volkov tweeted a picture signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the accompanying text, Volkov writes that the act of poisoning Navalny with Novichok was like leaving an autograph at the crime scene.
Ivan Zhananov, director of the Navali Anti-Corruption Foundation, also tweeted on Wednesday that Novichok would only be used. ” [Russian] State, “refers to the country’s intelligence agencies.” Zidanov added, “This is beyond any reasonable doubt.
Other Kremlin critics or opponents have been involved in apparent poisoning incidents or have suffered mysterious deaths.
In March 2018, former Russian spy Sergei Skripal was the target of a Novikok nerve agent attack in the English cathedral city of Salisbury. Scripps and his daughter Yulia both fell seriously ill after the attack.
The pair recovered but died after 44-year-old Don Sturges, who accidentally came in contact with a military-grade nerve agent, died.
Andrea Sella, a professor of inorganic chemistry at University College London, told CNN: “The identification of the poison as one of the family of Novichok agents strongly emphasizes that the Russian government is responsible for this atrocity.”
“The Russian government has the motivation for it, but also a track record on many levels,” Sella said. “Both of them show their ruthlessness as well as their level of emancipation. It is clear that they care very much about international views and they are ready to take action because they know the consequences are very small.”
Novichok means “novice” in Russian. Chemical weapons were first secretly developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War in the 1980s.
Its existence remained a secret until the mid-1990s, when information about the product was leaked by a disgruntled Soviet scientist and whistle-blower Will Mirzayanov. Even today, no country outside of Russia is known to have developed objects in the Novichok group.
CNN’s Gianluca Mesophyre and Daria Tarasova contributed to the report.
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