MOSCOW, October 8. /TASS/. Germany, acting with strong support from the United States, Britain, France, Sweden and a number of other countries is trying to make the world believe a far-fetched version of the case of the alleged poisoning of convicted blogger Alexey Navalny, as follows from Annex 1 to Russia's counter-demarche in the OPCW, uploaded to the Russian Foreign Ministry's website on Friday.
"Germany, acting with strong support from the United States, France, Sweden and some other countries, is intensively imposing on the whole world a far-fetched version of an alleged 'poisoning' of the aforesaid blogger by some toxic chemical from a family of compounds that the Western countries very often refer to as Novichok," the document reads.
The Annex says that the German government in fact poses obstructions to the Russian side in investigating the Navalny incident by refusing, using various weak pretexts, to maintain international cooperation in legal and criminal proceedings.
"The German government stubbornly dodges a meaningful dialogue with its own legislators, who have on three occasions - in October and December 2020 and August 2021 - addressed it with queries regarding the Alexey Navalny incident," the document says. "The replies received by the German legislators are preposterously brief, and many absolutely specific questions, crucial to establishing the truth are passed over in silence."
At the 98th session of the OPCW Executive Council, which opened on October 5, a group of 45 countries, mostly from the Euro-Atlantic Community addressed Russia with a query over the Navalny case. Russia provided a response within two days and initiated a counter-query, addressed to Germany, France and Sweden and also the OPCW technical secretariat.
Navalny was taken to a hospital in Omsk on August 20, 2020, after collapsing on board a plane. Later, he was taken to Berlin for treatment at the Charite hospital. The German government on September 2, 2020, claimed that the blogger was affected by a toxic agent from the Novichok family. The media said Navalny was brought to Germany as Chancellor Angela Merkel's "guest". The Russian authorities repeatedly said that before his transportation to Berlin no toxic agents had been found in Navalny's system. They also expressed the readiness to cooperate in investigating the incident and sent several official requests on that score.