MOSCOW, September 23. /TASS/. The ongoing disinformation campaign over blogger Alexey Navalny’s alleged poisoning, launched by the West is well-orchestrated and aimed at undermining the Russian economy and ruining relations with a number of allied countries, including Belarus, Chairman of the State Duma’s Commission for Investigating Foreign Interference in Russia’s Affairs, Vasily Piskaryov, said after the commission discussed the Navalny case on Wednesday.
“It has been established that a massive disinformation campaign over Navalny’s alleged deliberate poisoning in Russia is well-orchestrated,” Piskaryov said.
He believes that this smear campaign pursues several goals, including that of “upsetting Russia’s economic development through new sanctions,” “primarily, by using unfair competition methods to stop the Nord Stream 2 project, in combination with the sanctions introduced earlier, and blocking contacts between the Russian research centers that work on medicines and anti-virus vaccines, including those for COVID-19,” the legislator specified. Sanctions against three leading research centers are already in effect. Piskaryov believes that the current situation is reminiscent of the well-known Magnitsky Act and Skripal affair scenarios.
Piskaryov said this disinformation scheme is aimed at ruining Russia’s fraternal alliance with Belarus and other friendly countries, thus repeating the Ukrainian scenario of 2014.
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 to be discharged from it on September 22.
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.