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meIn Moscow there was the first reaction to the “Spiegel” interview of Russian opponent Alexej Navalnyj by Vyacheslav Volodin, Speaker of the Lower House Duma. While Navalnyj was still in a coma, he described the “situation with Navalnyj” as a “planned action against Russia.” Now Volodin announced on the Duma website: “Navalnyj is a rude and a scoundrel. Putin saved his life. ” Volodin accused Navalnyj of cooperating with the secret services and the authorities of Western countries in their interests; This has been an unfounded claim by the power apparatus for years to discredit Navalnyj. President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, also claimed that Navalnyj was receiving “instructions” from the US secret service, the CIA. He reacted irritably to questions from journalists after the interview, describing Navalnyj’s statement that Putin was behind the attack as “absolutely baseless and inadmissible.” Furthermore, “we consider a series of statements in the interview mentioned as insulting, absolutely insulting and even unacceptable.” Peskov said that Navalnyj’s “rhetoric” in the interview was “a well-known tool used by those who want to catch up with the first person in the state and demand some kind of participation in the political struggle.”
In Russia, Navalnyj is no longer allowed to stand for election or register a party, and he and his colleagues are persecuted. Since the failed assassination attempt, the 44-year-old anti-corruption fighter has become an even bigger problem for the Kremlin. The name of the opponent, which Putin does not speak publicly, now appears on the Kremlin website, foreign heads of state and government are constantly approaching Putin about the case. In his representation of the interior of Russia, the multitude of almost natural attempts to explain the collapse of Navalnyj on the plane on August 20 (hypoglycemia, heat, cold, diet, alcohol abuse) has taken a back seat. Rather, an attempt is being made to portray the process as a “staging”, for example by the Foreign Ministry, which speaks of a “performance”, and by state television.
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For the latest edition of the state television weekly “Nachrichten der Woche” last Sunday, presenter Dmitrij Kisselev was filmed in a bathrobe while shaving in a hotel room in the Siberian city of Tomsk, where Navalnyj is presumed to have been. poisoned. Kisselev presented it as if Navalnyj refused to hand over samples and accept an “international investigation”: “Moscow agrees and is ready, the patient from Berlin refuses to participate in the investigation.” Actually, Navalnyj was during his two-day stay in hospital in Samples taken from the city of Omsk in which, according to official Russian data, no toxic substance was found. Furthermore, there is still no criminal investigation into the case in Russia, only opaque preliminary investigations in the context of which requests for mutual legal assistance were made to Berlin. Kisselev said he had also invited his wife to the hotel, but “she says she is upset. The truth is that I am too, but I had to get used to it ”. Kisselev ruled that everything in the hotel was quiet and safe and concluded that “Europe” only wanted a pretext for new sanctions.
At the same time, Moscow is trying to discredit the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), whose analysis of the Navalnyj case is expected. Laboratories in Sweden and France have confirmed Novitschok’s findings from the German Bundeswehr Institute. But the outcome of the international organization based in The Hague, of which Russia is a member, is of particular importance: it includes Novichok on its list of banned chemical warfare agents. In the Navalnyj case, Berlin took the multilateral path through the OPCW from the beginning and does not share any results bilaterally with Russia. Moscow is so angry about this that the Foreign Ministry accuses Berlin of an “anti-Russian hostile line” in the Navalnyj case and the now known visit of Chancellor Angela Merkel to Navalnyj in the Charité – of which they were not known. neither the time, the content of the conversation nor the photos – “Try to genuinely politicize this issue,” they flagellated.
Moscow tries to cast doubt on the OPCW
Now even the Kremlin itself is busy casting doubt on the OPCW. The cooperation cannot be considered effective, Peskow said on Wednesday. The discrediting was previously a matter for the Foreign Ministry, which announced Tuesday that there was no doubt that the long-awaited OPCW report would also find traces of Novichok near Navalnyj: the samples were in a “secret operation” by the “politically active and partial “technical secretariat taken from the OPCW and all participants in it” carefully hidden from us.
