MOSCOW, February 20. /TASS/. Germany has again refused to furnish information about the alleged poisoning of opposition figure Alexey Navalny to Russia, the press service of the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office told reporters on Saturday.

"In response to the query of the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation dated January 21, 2021, a reply containing another refusal to cooperate in order to clarify the circumstances that resulted in [Alexey] Navalny’s hospitalization has been received from the competent authorities of the Federal Republic of Germany," the press service said. "Both the tone of the letter received from our foreign counterparts and its contents are deeply disappointing."

"It is obvious that Germany is actually evading answers, and avoiding tough questions," the Prosecutor General’s Office stressed.

It noted that this could only be viewed as an attempt by the relevant German authorities to ignore the obligations arising from the European Convention on Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters of April 20, 1959. "While stressing once again that the Russian Federation is ready for productive cooperation, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office calls on the German side to reconsider this unconstructive approach," the press service stated.

On January 21, Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office said that it had sent another query on the issue urging the German authorities to comply with the previous requests. It explained that, since most of the requests from the Russian investigative body [the Interior Ministry’s Transport Department in the Siberian Federal District] had been rejected, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office regarded that as a complete failure to comply with Russia’s requests for legal assistance on formal grounds.

Russia sent a total of five requests for legal assistance to Germany from August 27, 2020, to January 21, 2021, regarding the incident involving Navalny, who collapsed on board a flight from Tomsk to Moscow.