BRUSSELS, September 15. /TASS/. Russia’s permanent mission to the European Union has addressed a number of questions to the members of the European Parliament and EU institutions concerning the situation around Russian opposition blogger Alexey Navalny and pointed to numerous inconsistencies in the poisoning theory.
"This document was earlier referred to the European Parliament," a spokesman for the Russian mission told TASS on Tuesday. "It is address to the members of the European Parliament and general public in Europe."
"In recent weeks we have been witnessing a rapidly growing information campaign in the EU - both in official circles and media - over an incident which occurred with a Russian political activist and blogger Alexey Navalny on 20 August 2020," the mission said in a commentary posted on its website on Tuesday. "Not claiming to be experts in toxicology, we still consider it necessary to draw your attention to multiple inconsistencies regarding this case. In the light of forthcoming debate in the European Parliament we call on EU officials and MEPs to look into a number of following questions."
"Would there be any rationale behind the Russian authorities’ alleged decision to poison Alexey Navalny with the use of a military-grade chemical nerve agent of the "Novichok" group, which falls under CWC ban, in a Russian city with half a million population and then to do their utmost to save his life and let him go for further medical treatment to Germany, where "Novichok" could be identified? What would be the reason for the Russian authorities to poison Alexey Navalny, taking into account that his actual popularity level hardly reaches 2%, according to the recent survey conducted in July 2020 by Levada Centre, an independent, nongovernmental polling and sociological research organization?," the document reads. These are only two of the nine questions posed by the Russian side.
Navalny case
Navalny felt sick on August 20 while flying from Tomsk to Moscow and the plane made an emergency landing in Omsk. The man was taken to hospital in a state of coma and was connected to a ventilator. He was airlifted to the Berlin-based Charite clinic on August 22. Its doctors said that indicators of poisoning had been found in his body.
Charite medics said on September 7 Navalny had been taken out of the medically-induced coma and was being disconnected from the ventilator.
The German government said earlier that German military toxicologists had found that Navalny had been exposed to a nerve agent of the Novichok family. Following this, Berlin and its Western partners demanded Moscow clarify the circumstances of the incident and warned they would look at possible sanctions against Moscow.
The Russian side stresses that it is interested in a thorough investigation of the incident and is ready for all-round cooperation with Germany on that matter. Apart from that, Moscow points to the fact that no toxic agent had been spotted in Navalny’s samples before he was taken to Germany whereas the latter has given no evidence to back its theory.
Speaker of the Russian State Duma lower parliament house Vyacheslav Volodin said in an interview with the Rossiya-24 television channel earlier on Tuesday that the Navalny affair was a provocation staged by Western nations led by the United States geared to hamper Russia’s development.