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The Russian Foreign Ministry has asked the German ambassador in Moscow to clarify Berlin’s accusation that opposition politician Alexei Navalny has been poisoned, Russian foreign spokeswoman Marija Zaharova told the MTI.
The head of mission is expected to be at the Russian diplomatic ministry on Wednesday. Zaharova said German government representatives should “reveal their letters” because she said Berlin was “bragging” about “dirty political intrigue”.
He noted that although Moscow had not yet received a response to its request for legal assistance from Berlin, the German Foreign Minister spoke of “many testimonies” of the complicity of the Russian government, the Charité Clinic in Berlin was exchanging information with the laboratories of the German and British army, and with Bulgarian institutions.
What about North Stream 2?
“This is too serious a matter for German officials to keep everything to themselves,” Zaharova said.
Alexander Grusko, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister, told reporters that the Navalny affair should not affect the construction of Nord Stream 2 because the project, which he believes will strengthen Europe’s energy security and provide a basis for cooperation, should remain out of politics.
In response to the call of the president of the United States, Donald Trump, to Europe to abandon the gas pipeline, the diplomat said that the United States is fighting “consistently and systematically” against the project. He believed that Europe should muster its forces to defend its national interests “if it does not have the arm to find itself in a vassal position.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also said it was appropriate to raise the question of ending Nord Stream 2 at its political level. He pointed out that the gas pipeline is basically an international business project in which German companies are also participating.
The aircraft made a forced medical landing in Omsk, where Navalny was treated by locals and sent specialists from Moscow to the scene, and then transported to Berlin on August 22 at the request of his relatives. His followers claimed that the politician was poisoned, which Russian experts repeatedly rejected.
Based on samples taken from the 44-year-old Navalny organization, chemical weapons experts from the German army showed that the opposition politician was poisoned with one of the varieties of Novicok-type combat neurotoxins developed in the former Soviet Union. The German government said on Wednesday, based on the results of the investigation, that Navalny had been the victim of a toxic attack in his country.
Moscow, for its part, complained that the German side had not provided information on its findings at the request of the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office or the doctors treating Navalny. Referring to the lack of evidence for the toxin, the Russian authorities did not launch a criminal investigation, only a preliminary investigation.
Alexander Sabayev, the chief toxicologist for Omsk county, said Tuesday that the first ambulance hospital in Omsk was ready to hand over Navalny’s findings to Charite, but the Berlin hospital was not interested in what tests the politician had been done. As he said, the relationship between the two hospitals was broken on August 23, when all the institutions still offered to exchange data.
Sabayev said that if the politician had been poisoned with an organophosphate compound, he would have died that day.
Yevgeny Prigozsin, a businessman close to the Kremlin, transferred one million rubles (about four million guilders at the current exchange rate) to the account of the Charité Clinic in Berlin, which Navalny manages.
“Let me heal myself until I recover, mainly because he owes me money,” Prigozsin, an interest-bearing businessman, told the press department of Concord Food Company.
Navalny and the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) he founded lost 88 million rubles in a defamation lawsuit against the businessman in July. The politician is charged a third of the amount. Prigozsin has been associated with online and mercenary disinformation campaigns abroad.
Didn’t they want to kill you, just paralyze them?
Vil Mirzajanov, one of the creators of the poison Novics who lives in the United States, told the Estonian portal ERR that his attackers did not want to kill Navalny, but to paralyze him and leave him unable to work. According to an interview with Interfax, “behind the poisoning is the GRU (this is the name of the Russian military intelligence used until 2010)”. He believed the assassins were confident that the poison would be drained from the politician’s organization, but modern technology, which the Omsk hospital did not have, could detect its traces.
According to the chemist, there are also such machines in Moscow, but the information there is carried out through special services, so it cannot be trusted. Mirzayanov called the Russian attorney general’s request for legal assistance to the German authorities a “trick” because the interpretation of the data that Germany will provide would be drowned in a dispute dragged by Moscow.
Another chemist, Vladimir Uglyov, who was also involved in the development of the Novics, had previously ruled out the use of this type of poison, which he said would have caused immediate death and endangered the life of the murderer himself and Navalny’s environment. .
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