MOSCOW, August 1. /TASS/. Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service knows part of the truth about Alexey Navalny’s case, the Service’s director, Sergei Naryshkin, said on Sunday.
"We know part of the truth. Not everything, I won’t be indulging in boasting. But we know something about the Berlin patient. Only part of the truth, or some indirect evidence of the truth," he said in an interview with the Solovyov Live YouTube channel partially shown on the Rossiya-1 television channel.
According to Naryshkin, over the year of the developments around Navalny, Moscow has received reliable and verified information that a meeting of special services officers, non-government organizations activists and government officials was held in a European country to discuss ways of supporting the protest movement in Russia. "They discussed in all seriousness that sacred sacrifices were needed. And it would be better that such a leader of the protest movement played the role of such sacrifice. I don’t mean to say anything but it hints to some parallels," he said.
He also confirmed that when Navalny had been taken to Germany his sample had had no signs of toxic agents. "This is what our specialist say. And I trust them completely because, and you know it, an whole set of tests and examinations were done in our Russian hospital and, by the way, the most advanced equipment was used, to find out that neither his blood nor other biological materials had anything that could indicate the presence of any toxic agents," Naryshkin stressed.
Alexey Navalny was rushed to a local hospital in the Siberian city of Omsk on August 20, 2020, 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, the German government claimed that he had been affected by a toxic agent belonging to the Novichok family. Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov pointed out that no poisonous substances had been detected in Navalny’s system prior to his transfer to Berlin.