YEKATERINBURG, September 30. /TASS/. The incident with blogger Alexey Navalny won’t affect French-Russian relations in the security field, French Ambassador to Russia Pierre Levy told a news conference in Yekaterinburg on Wednesday.
"Not only Europe, but also other countries are waiting for the situation to be clarified. But this does not worsen relations with Russia and does not harm those aspirations that we have in the sphere of economic development, cooperation in the field of security with Russia," Levy said.
According to the diplomat, the incident with Navalny is a problem of the international level, not of bilateral relations.
"This is not a Russian-French issue and this is not a Russian-German issue either, this is the issue of the international level. <...> Yes, I will say that this question is primarily addressed to Russia - what happened here? And in this context, it is absolutely necessary to clarify and investigate all this within this framework," the ambassador said.
Navalny case
Russian blogger Alexey Navalny was rushed to a local hospital in the Siberian city of Omsk on August 20 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, Berlin claimed that having examined Navalny’s test samples, German government toxicologists had come to the conclusion that the blogger had been affected by a toxic agent belonging to the Novichok family.
French President Emmanuel Macron told a news conference on September 28 that Paris considered that the conclusions on the Navalny case would depend on whether Russia was ready to provide the necessary clarification.
Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia was ready for comprehensive cooperation with Germany. He pointed out that no poisonous substances had been detected in Navalny’s system prior to his transfer to Berlin. He said on September 23 that Moscow wanted to find out what had happened to Navalny "but so far Russian investigators have no evidence of the presence of any toxic substances, let alone chemical warfare agents, in Navalny’s body.".