MOSCOW, July 22. /TASS/: Inconsistencies in the report of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) on the incident with Russian blogger Alexey Navalny confirm that the incident was an orchestrated provocation, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told a briefing on Thursday.
Zakharova pointed to the previous inconsistencies. Thus, the report mentioned that the OPCW Technical Secretariat had deployed a technical assistance mission related to the suspected "poisoning of a Russian citizen" at Germany’s request on August 20, 2020 - the day of the Navalny incident. The diplomat emphasized that the drafting of Germany’s request to the OPCW had to take a considerable amount of time, as that could not have happened immediately.
"We believe that this newly revealed fact in the case of the alleged poisoning of Navalny must become the matter of a most thorough study. It is necessary to finally shed the light on the origins of this clearly orchestrated provocation, which, obviously, was intended to cast a shadow on the reputation of our country and in general, to eventually undermine the reputation of the OPCW," the diplomat stressed.
She emphasized that the Foreign Ministry welcomed the initiative of the State Duma lower house of parliament to engage the potentials of inter-parliamentary cooperation with Germany and the OPCW Technical Secretariat to investigate the meddling in Russia’s domestic affairs. "A respective message will be shortly sent to the addressees. We expect that it will be duly studied, and the State Duma legislators, who represent the Russian people, will get an exhaustive answer to it," Zakharova added.
She also noted that the Russian General Prosecutor’s Office has not seen an ‘intelligible reaction’ to any of the eight requests sent within 2020-2021 to German law enforcement agencies in order to clarify the circumstances of the Navalny incident.
On July 21, the German Embassy in Moscow said that the mistake in the date had been corrected by the Technical Secretariat. It said the new reading gave the correct date of Germany’s request for technical assistance - September 4, 2020. In comments on this information, Zakharova said that the attempts to justify the discrepancies in the report are "thinly veiled".
Alexey Navalny incident
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. Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov pointed out that no poisonous substances had been detected in Navalny’s system prior to his transfer to Berlin.
