MOSCOW, September 8. /TASS/. Russia’s delegation has called on the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) to rely only on verified facts in what concerns the incident with Russian opposition blogger Alexei Navalny, Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the international committee of the Russian State Duma lower parliament house, said on Tuesday after a meeting of the PACE Political Affairs and Democracy Committee.
"The PACE Political Affairs and Democracy Committee has just finished the discussion of the situation around blogger Alexei Navalny. Regrettably, I have to say that this matter was politicized even in the virtual format," he wrote on his Telegram channel. According to the lawmaker, delegates from the Baltic countries and Ukraine "traditionally took a radically Russophobic position insisting on a theory of willful poisoning of Navalny and possible involvement of the Russian authorities."
"We had to explain at the elementary level essential things: what is going on around Navalny now is pure provocation. It is proved by carbon-copy anti-Russian statements made on the background of seesawing of the German government about the future of the Nord Stream-2 project and US President Donald Trump’s open demands works on this project be stopped completely," Slutsky said.
The Russian delegation called on the PACE "to work with verified facts," he went on to say. "We hope that cooperation with Germany on Navalny’s case will finally be constructive, first of all, in the interests of the Charite clinic’s patient. And I think the PASCE should help organize such cooperation rather than indulge in hysteria."
Navalny case
Navalny felt sick on August 20 while flying from Tomsk to Moscow and the plane made an emergency landing in Omsk. The man was taken to hospital in a state of coma and was connected to a ventilator. He was airlifted to the Berlin-based Charite clinic in the morning on August 22. Its doctors said that indicators of poisoning had been found in his body.
Charite medics said on Monday Navalny had been taken out of the medically-induced coma and was being disconnected from the ventilator.
On August 2, the German government said that German military toxicologists had found that Navalny had been exposed to a nerve agent of the Novichok family. Following this, Berlin and its Western partners demanded Moscow clarify the circumstances of the incident and warned they would look at possible sanctions against Moscow. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said that Berlin’s position on the Nord Stream-2 project would depend on Russia’s further steps on the Navalny incident.
The Russian side stresses that it is interested in a thorough investigation of the incident but has not yet received any reply from Germany to its inquiry. Apart from that, Moscow points to the fact that no toxic agent had been spotted in Navalny’s samples before he was taken to Germany whereas the latter has given no evidence to back its theory.