MOSCOW, January 28. /TASS/. The West has not yet responded to Russia’s inquiries on blogger Alexey Navalny’s case, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday.

"We have received no answer to the question who flew out to pick up Alexey Navalny, why, judging by objective data, the plane that took him from Omsk <…> had been chartered a day before he felt sick. Why are there no answers to the questions asked at the German parliament in an utterly concrete way?" he said in an interview with radio stations.

According to the Russian top diplomat, Germany first refused to share data on this case saying it was allegedly classified military information and then citing Navalny’s refusal as a reason.

The minister also commented on the statement by Navalny’s attorney who demanded Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov give evidence confirming his words that Navalny had collaborated with the CIA. "What kind of evidence? That American intelligence officers visited him in hospital, which is what Dmitry Peskov said? But when we demand evidence to back up the horrible accusations of seeking to kill a human being, they tell us: ‘No, he (Navalny - TASS) doesn’t want to provide it,’" he said.

Lavrov also noted that it took only three days to identify toxins in Navalny’s samples at the Bundeswehr clinic, which is impossible to do in such a short span of time. "Allegations that toxic substances were found in Alexey Navalny’s organism came after nothing prohibited by the Chemical Weapons Convention had been detected at the Charite clinic but all this was found at the Bundeswehr clinic and in just three days. <…> Germany, France, and Sweden swore that they don’t possess such technologies. It is impossible to identify any substance in a human organism in three days without having corresponding technologies - any chemist will tell you that," he explained.

"So far, I tend to think that the West has no grounds to accuse us and the entire affair was ventured as a provocation, Lavrov added.

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 the blogger had been affected by a toxic agent belonging to the Novichok family. Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov pointed out that no poisonous substances had been detected in Navalny’s system prior to his transfer to Berlin.