Sergey Lavrov
Russia has no answers to inquiries about the situation with Alexei Navalny, either from Germany or from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). This was stated by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, RIA Novosti reports.
The Foreign Minister noted that Berlin has still “not provided consular access to our citizen,” although such a request was sent a week and a half ago. In this regard, Lavrov hopes that in Germany they will be able to understand the futility of the conversation “from the position of some higher being, arrogantly demanding repentance.”
In addition, the minister also complained about the work of the OPCW, which “continues to fool around.” She redirects all questions to Berlin, and Germany, in turn, again advises to contact The Hague, where the headquarters of the OPCW is located.
On September 23, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Germany was not trying to help Moscow in the situation with Navalny. In particular, Berlin is in no hurry to share all the information and is deliberately playing for time, not responding to requests from the Prosecutor General's Office of Russia, Zakharova said. Prior to that, the Russian Ambassador to Germany, Sergei Nechaev, also noted that the German side had already sent samples related to the Navalny case to laboratories in France, Sweden, and also to the OPCW, while Moscow had not yet received them.
Navalny became ill on August 20 during a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. In the first two days, doctors from the Omsk hospital helped him. They also introduced him to an artificial coma. On August 22, the patient was sent to a clinic in Berlin. On September 2, the German government said that military toxicologists had found traces of a substance from the Novichok group in Navalny's body, and called on the Russian government to respond to this information. Russian doctors say that no poisons were found in the patient's analyzes. On September 10, it became known that Navalny had completely recovered.
