THE HAGUE, September 10. /TASS/. Moscow is ready to discuss the situation with Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny within the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), if the issue is put forward by Germany, Russia's Permanent Representative to the OPCW Alexander Shulgin told TASS on Thursday.
"More peculiarities arise in the "Navalny case," he noted. "Yesterday, German officials stated that they had handed over all the materials confirming that the Russian citizen was poisoned to the OPCW. However, we checked these statements and found them to be untrue: Germany did not send anything to the OPCW Technical Secretariat neither yesterday nor this morning." "We expect Germany to provide a clear explanation on this issue," Shulgin stressed.
"In any case, if the issue is put forward by our German partners in The Hague, we are ready to consider it strictly within the legal field of the [Chemical Weapons] Convention," he said.
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.