MOSCOW, October 1. /TASS/. Russia’s State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin blasted blogger Alexey Navalny on Thursday branding him a collaborator of Western intelligence agencies, who facilitates their agenda, according to the lower house’s website.
"Navalny is a shameless person and a skunk. Putin saved his life. If what happened to him had been orchestrated by the intelligence services of Western countries, then his statement fits perfectly into the scheme of things," Volodin said commenting on Navalny’s allegations that the Russian president was allegedly linked to his health scare.
"Everyone genuinely worked to save him - from the pilots and doctors to the president. And only an ingrate could make such statements," the politician stressed.
Volodin also noted that Germany’s Bundestag had refused to set up a working group with the Russian State Duma to clarify the situation. "Despite the request filed by our agencies, Russia has neither received any biomaterials nor any conclusions by the doctors who examined Navalny when he was admitted to the hospital," the lower house speaker elaborated.
"This once again shows that all this had been orchestrated by Western countries in order to whip up tensions in Russia right when the Belarusian election results were being counted, and to block our country and prevent it from defending the sovereignty of our allied state. Those who wanted to get their hands on Belarus failed to do so," the speaker specified.
"These are all links in the same chain. It is utterly obvious that Navalny is working with the intelligence agencies and governments of Western states. He is working in their interests," Volodin noted.
Earlier, Chairman of the State Duma’s Commission on Foreign Interference in Russia’s Internal Affairs Vasily Piskarev submitted a request to Wolfgang Schauble, president of the Bundestag, on setting up this working group.
Navalny’s ‘poisoning’ saga
Russian blogger Alexey 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. He said on September 23 that Moscow wanted to find out what had happened to Navalny, "but so far Russian investigators have no evidence of the presence of any toxic substances, let alone chemical warfare agents, in Navalny’s body.".