MOSCOW, September 24. /TASS/. The European Parliament’s resolution on the situation in Russia and the poisoning of blogger Alexey Navalny is a blatant attempt to meddle in domestic affairs and influence political processes, Ilya Timokhov, deputy director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Information and Press Department, said on Thursday.
"We believe that the conclusions are quite obvious. It’s difficult to imagine more blatant attempts of interfering in the country’s domestic affairs and influencing our internal political processes," the diplomat told a meeting of the Federation Council’s temporary commission on protecting state sovereignty and preventing meddling in Russia’s domestic affairs.
On September 17, the European Parliament passed a resolution suggesting that the EU bodies should develop "a new comprehensive strategy, which will be conditional on further developments in the area of democracy" and demand that Russia repeal the recently approved constitutional amendments. The EP believes that all this should become a response to the incident with Navalny, which should be investigated at the international level. This resolution is non-binding.
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.