MOSCOW, September 23. /TASS/. The Kremlin does not see any direct accusations against Russia in French President Emmanuel Macron’s statements on the situation with Russian blogger Alexey Navalny.
"If Vladimir Putin’s French counterpart has any accusations against Russia and the president in the context of the story with the Berlin patient [Navalny] we strongly reject this. Meanwhile, we don’t see any direct accusations and would not like to see them," Peskov told reporters on Wednesday, commenting on Macron’s speech at the UN General Assembly’s session.
On the eve of the UNGA’s session, the French leader stated that Paris called on Moscow to fully shed light on the attempt of murdering political opposition figure Navalny using the Novichok nerve agent.
The Russian presidential spokesman agreed that chemical weapons and any of their components are absolutely unacceptable "in Russia, in Europe or anywhere else." He emphasized that Moscow was fully meeting its commitments under the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Peskov reiterated Moscow's willingness to find out the cause of the incident with Navalny but, as he pointed out, the Russian investigators did not have any evidence of toxic substances in his body, and moreover warfare agents.
Russia repeatedly demanded that its Western colleagues share data confirming that the notorious substance had been used and Moscow still expects and believes that this information could help the investigators, Peskov noted.
Navalny case
Navalny was rushed to a local hospital in the Siberian city of Omsk on August 20 after collapsing on a Moscow-bound flight from Tomsk. He fell into a coma and was put on a ventilator in an intensive care unit. On August 22, he was airlifted to Berlin and admitted to the Charite hospital.
On September 2, Berlin claimed that having examined Navalny’s test samples, German government toxicologists had come to the conclusion that the blogger had been affected by a toxic agent belonging to the Novichok family.
Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia was ready for comprehensive cooperation with Germany. He pointed out that no poisonous substances had been detected in Navalny’s system prior to his transfer to Berlin. Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that the German Foreign Office had not provided the Russian ambassador with any proof of its version of the incident.