MOSCOW, September 10. /TASS/. Germany’s behavior in relation to the incident with Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny is similar to the Salisbury case and the crash of Flight MH17 in Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters on Thursday.
"When the official spokesman of the German government says that the request of the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office was handed over to independent justice bodies and the German government cannot do anything in this regard, yet it demands that we hold an investigation, this reminds us of the precedents created by our Western colleagues after the Salisbury poisoning, when everything was confidential, and we did not have any information, namely information on the whereabouts of Russian citizens, the Skripals," he said.
Besides, Lavrov noted, the current situation is similar to the treatment of the MH17 crash in Ukraine in 2014. "The Netherlands regularly accused us of refusing to cooperate, despite numerous efforts by our official structures to provide information that we had, and despite our numerous offers to carry out a serious investigation of all facts without exception," the minister added.
Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny was rushed to a local hospital in the Siberian city of Omsk on August 20 after collapsing on the Tomsk-Moscow flight. He fell into a coma and was hooked up to a ventilator in the intensive care unit. On August 22, he was airlifted to the Charite hospital in Berlin. Last week, the German government claimed that Navalny had been poisoned with a Novichok-type toxic agent.
Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said later that Russia is ready for comprehensive cooperation with Germany. He noted that before Navalny was transferred to Berlin, no toxic substances had been found in his system.
On September 7, the German clinic informed that Navalny had been brought out of a coma, and that he is gradually being taken off artificial ventilation.