THE HAGUE, October 8. /TASS/. Western countries have no interest in establishing the truth about the situation around Russian blogger Alexey Navalny, they only seek to slap Russia with sanctions, Russia’s envoy to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) Alexander Shulgin told TASS on Thursday.
Commenting on discussions of the organization’s 98th Executive Council meeting, the Russian envoy said the difficult discussion was "a yet another evidence of how politicized the atmosphere within the organization has become through the fault of Western countries."
"Personally, I’m becoming more and more convinced that all this saga around requests on Navalny has nothing to do with investigation and establishing the truth," he said. "This is nothing but an attempt by an interest group of Western countries to promote their narrow and selfish interests and to impose more and more sanctions on Russia."
"Quite possibly, they were not even expecting any answer from us," the diplomat continued. "No matter what we say, they are not satisfied. All of this is considered as a reason for putting pressure on Russia, again and again. But this is what I’m going to say: we are already used to this, as Americans and their allies have been imposing sanctions for any reason, or even without it. They don’t need any pretext at all."
Speaking about the possibility of sanctions, Shulgin said: "This is, of course, sad, but not critical. We will certainly find an adequate response."
"Too bad our cooperation won’t develop. But, in general, cooperation is a two-way street. You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink. If they don’t want to cooperate, we won’t," the diplomat said.
The 98th meeting of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) Executive Council began on October 5. During the meeting, a group of 45 nations, the majority of them members of the Euro-Atlantic community, sent to Russia a request about blogger Alexei Navalny’s situation. Russia answered the request within two days and initiated a counter-inquiry to Germany, France, Sweden and the organization’s Technical Secretariat.
Russian blogger Alexey Navalny was hospitalized in Omsk on August 20, 2020, after his health rapidly deteriorated aboard a plane en route from Tomsk to Moscow. Later, he was transferred to the Charite clinic in Berlin. On September 2, 2020, the German government claimed that the blogger was poisoned by a Novichok-family nerve agent. Russian authorities repeatedly underscored that no poisonous substances were detected in his body before his transfer to Berlin. Russia stated its readiness for a comprehensive cooperation in the investigation of the incident and sent several official requests on this case.