THE HAGUE, July 9. /TASS/. Western countries have no intention to stop raising the alleged poisoning of Alexey Navalny at the Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) platform, Russian envoy to the organization Alexander Shulgin told TASS Friday.
"The discussion of the fake poisoning of Alexey Navalny was not left without discussion this time," he said, summarizing the July 6-8 OPCW Executive Council session. "Such anti-Russian rhetoric, apparently, has become firm sediment in the minds of the Euro-NATO ones and their accomplices. Considering that the keep repeating the same thing time and time again during meetings of the OPCW top bodies, they do not intend to leave it alone any time soon."
"In order to parry these provocative fakes we try to get through to those delegations that can still express their independent opinion and follow in the wake of the US and their allies," Shulgin noted. "We explain on concrete examples that, for example, Germany, France and Swede have still not provided a single substantial answer to the numerous requests, filed by the Prosecutor General’s Office of Russia. The official requests of the Russian Federation on the Chemical Weapons Convention have also been left without satisfaction."
According to the envoy, "the insolvency of this case is obvious."
"I won’t delve into details, but the very fact that, according to the draft OPCW report on the implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention in 2020, the Technical Secretariat said is dispatched a group of experts for technical assistance to Germany over the suspected poisoning of a Russian citizen on August 20 last year [when Navalny was still onboard the Tomsk-Moscow plane - TASS] speaks for itself," he noted. "It is even more bewildering that, following our remarks in this regard, the Technical Secretariat, which prepared the document, preferred to remain silent, and only Germany alone attempted to excuse for the alleged ‘technical mistake.’ All this causes a lot of questions. We will get to the bottom of this."
Besides, Shulgin mentioned the failed trip of OPCW experts to Russia for cooperation on the Navalny case, blaming the Technical Secretariat for the visit not having come to fruition.
Alexey Navalny was hospitalized in Omsk on August 20, 2020, when his health deteriorated rapidly aboard the plane en route from Tomsk to Moscow. Later, he was transferred to the Charite clinic in Berlin. On September 2, the German government claimed that the Russian blogger was affected by a Novichok-family poisonous agent. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated that no poison was detected in Navalny’s body prior to his transfer to Berlin.