MOSCOW, November 12. /TASS/. Russia has circulated as an official document of the UN Security Council its assessment of replies received from Britain, Germany, France and Sweden to its query over the incident involving blogger Alexey Navalny. These countries’ stance does not allow for establishing the truth within the framework of the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a news release on Friday.
"This paper was circulated in the capacity of an official document of the UN Security Council and an official document of the 98th session of the OPCW Executive Council," a footnote reads.
On October 18, Britain, Germany, France and Sweden officially reacted via the OPCW's Technical Secretariat to Russia’s query within the established deadline, but, as the Russian Foreign Ministry said, the content of the replies "is unable to satisfy either Russia or any of the Convention’s signatories in their right mind - they are empty."
"We have to state that the received documents are nothing but non-committal replies formulated in line with the style of ‘megaphone diplomacy’ and contain ‘highly likely’ type of answers. They are obviously aimed at steering into a dead end all efforts to clear up the circumstances of the incident involving the blogger. <...> We state that the unconstructive stance taken by Britain, Germany, France and Sweden did not allow for establishing, within the framework of the mechanisms envisaged by article 9 of the Chemical Weapons Convention, the real circumstances of the incident involving Navalny," reads the document, which contains Russia’s assessments of the replies from the above-mentioned countries.
Once again Russia was denied legally requested information and materials important to completing the Russian Interior Ministry’s pre-investigation probe into whether the incident involving Navalny had traits of a corpus delicti and criminal proceedings should be launched based on its results, the Foreign Ministry said.
"The actions that have been systematically taken by the German authorities and their Euro-Atlantic allies starting from August 20, 2020 clearly indicate there was a pre-planned provocation aimed at discrediting Russia in the eyes of the world public and causing it not only political harm, but also financial and economic damage through sanctions," the Foreign Ministry said.