MOSCOW, November 6. /TASS/. The sequence of events in the alleged poisoning of Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny shows that it is a well-staged stunt launched to impose sanctions against Russia, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement Friday.
"Any uninvolved observer, far removed from applied chemistry and issues of non-proliferation of chemical weapons, logically starts to have a feeling that everything that is happening is an amateurishly staged stunt whose key plot is another ‘sanction shot’ against Russia as it firmly sticks to its guns of not accepting certain rules imposed on it at the expense of national sovereignty, international law and common sense in general," the diplomatic agency noted.
Requests ignored
The ministry also emphasized the "synchronized nature of actions" undertaken by Germany, Sweden and France and recalled the requests sent to these three European countries by the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office.
Moreover, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s notes to counterpart agencies in Berlin, Paris and Stockholm, requesting additional information to implement the obligations assumed by these three countries under provision 2 article 7 of the Chemical Weapons Convention, remained unanswered.
"Similar applications were sent to the OPCW Technical Secretariat whose specialists were involved since September 5 in an, in fact, secret operation to collect biological samples from Alexey Navalny and deliver them to two laboratories certified by the organization," the ministry added.
On top of that, proposals of Russian parliamentarians and doctors to establish joint work with German colleagues to investigate all details of the incident were ignored.
Navalny case
Russian opposition figure 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 22, Navalny was discharged from the 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. According to Germany, these findings were confirmed by laboratories in France and Sweden.
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.