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Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the European Union

Submitted on 2021-08-19 14:52:34

Press release on the anniversary of “Alexey Navalny case”


Press release on the anniversary of “Alexey Navalny case”

 

August 20 marks one year since the emergency hospitalisation of Russian blogger Alexey Navalny in Omsk - an incident which, through the purposeful efforts of a group of Western states, was raised to the level of an international event, which led to the bringing of unsubstantiated charges against Russia for allegedly using a “chemical warfare agent” on its territory. At the same time, the actions taken by the FRG authorities and their allies over the past 12 months clearly show that that a pre-planned provocation was carried out against our country to discredit the Russian Federation in the eyes of the international community and to damage its national interests.

This cold hard conclusion is based on the following objective evidence.

Literally from the first hours, the “Navalny case” went closely hand-in-hand with an aggressive propaganda campaign waged by Western and affiliated Russian information resources, the central thesis of which was the unfounded claim about the poisoning of the blogger by the Russian special services. Even the doctors at the Omsk hospital, who saved his life, eventually ended up in its crosshairs and were subjected to unconstrained public attacks.

The key to understanding the true nature of the events that followed August 20, 2020 is the fact that, having already stated unequivocally and publicly at the highest political level on September 2, 2020 that the Russian state was guilty of poisoning Mr Navalny with a “chemical warfare agent” (namely, Novichok which gained notoriety in the Skripal scam), the German authorities have not yet come up with any verifiable material or documentary evidence of their shameless accusations for the international community to see. What Berlin is doing is unabashedly claiming that the accusations are allegedly based on some classified findings of experts from, again, the German armed forces (that they came up with surprisingly quickly), as well as on their allegedly irrefutable confirmation from, once again, military experts from allied Germany, France and Sweden. However, just a couple or so years ago, these same countries were publicly trying to make everyone believe that they did not have the expertise that is needed to synthesise or detect Novichok. In turn, without any formal pretext, even before the official representatives of the Federal Republic of Germany “legalised” the military agent “version” planted in the media in advance, on August 26, 2020, the United States imposed, sanctions that it clearly had ready-prepared for use, on a number of Russian research institutions which Washington believed engaged in “developing chemical and biological weapons.”

The conduct of the Federal Office of Justice of the Federal Republic of Germany is quite telling. It largely ignored eight inquiries coming from the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation for international legal assistance in the “Navalny case” by not providing any meaningful answers to any of them, the most recent of which was sent to our German colleagues on May 11, 2021. Notably, their perfunctory replies to the Russian law enforcement agencies were getting increasingly derisive and defiant in tone. Overall, it looked like Berlin was having a laugh at our expense or a “bureaucratic game of ping-pong” with Moscow. In bilateral contacts, senior officials from the German Foreign Ministry openly admitted that Berlin was not planning on providing meaningful responses to the above inquires coming from the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation. According to them, Germany considered the case with the “poisoning” of the Russian blogger closed. This blatantly provocative position goes to show that Berlin and its allies are either trying to bring to a close the incident they have started and which gives rise to questions that are extremely uncomfortable for them and which continue to multiply, or they have already had enough of the international political effect produced by the escalation of this narrative, or have realised that fomenting it any further is futile.

Premeditated evil intent in the “Navalny case” as it relates to Russia can be clearly seen from the “well-coordinated interaction” of the Technical Secretariat of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW Technical Secretariat) and German diplomacy, which occasionally takes on Kafkaesque dimensions.

As a case in point, representatives of the FRG refused to cooperate with Russia in the “Navalny case” under the corresponding provisions of the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (CWC), referring to the fact that, according to them, it had become a matter of international importance and Moscow should contact the OPCW Technical Secretariat over any issues it may have. In turn, OPCW Technical Secretariat’s Director General Fernando Arias said that Berlin was the “owner” of the materials on this case and it should be contacted for all inquiries. The loop has thus closed.

Moreover, at the request of the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany and under a far-fetched pretext of obscure “proliferation risks,” in an already off-limits report of October 15, 2020 compiled by the OPCW Technical Secretariat about technical assistance provided by the OPCW to Germany in the “Navalny case,” all meaningful information about the agent that the OPCW specialists, as well as the German military, allegedly found in the blogger’s biological materials, was classified. The obvious inadequacy of the arguments provided by the German authorities in favour of the hard-to-account-for fact of concealing the formula of the allegedly toxic chemical agent was additionally confirmed with a similarly motivated refusal by the Germans to transfer it to Russia through bilateral trusted channels. If we consider the unfounded accusations brought by the FRG against our country well-founded, then Berlin is fearful that the formula of the notorious “Novichok” will become known to Moscow, which, according to the German scenario, produced it. This approach is clearly absurd.

If you think about the multiple contradictions and inconsistencies that the Russian Foreign Ministry has repeatedly pointed out following the Russian representatives’ meetings with the German diplomats and the OPCW Technical Secretariat’s leaders, the actions of both of the latter are reminiscent of convulsive and often failed attempts to mess things up in order to hide the truth. The “annoying,” according to German diplomats, “typos” in the draft report “CWC Implementation in 2020” alone say a lot: in the paragraph covering the provision of assistance to Berlin in the “Navalny case” by the OPCW Technical Secretariat it was stated that Germany’s request to send OPCW experts to the German capital was transferred to the OPCW on August 20, 2020, i.e. on the very day of the blogger's emergency hospitalisation in Omsk and before the analysis of his samples by the German military. A Freudian slip?

The OPCW Technical Secretariat acted in a similarly unseemly fashion (clearly, on a cue from outside), having blatantly dragged out, in the course of a formal exchange of letters, our country's request for the OPCW’s technical assistance in order to complete the pre-investigation checkup of the reasons for Alexey Navalny’s emergency hospitalisation that was being carried out  by the Russian Interior Ministry, which, under Russian law, is required before a criminal case on his alleged poisoning can be opened. In a clear effort to delay sending its specialists to Russia, the OPCW Technical Secretariat began to confront Moscow with its own demands (which it preferred not to do when Great Britain or Germany filed their inquiries). As a result, we were compelled to state the Technical Secretariat’s leadership categorical refusal to cooperate with us within the framework of the completely transparent and clear modalities that we came up with.

However, joint testing of Navalny’s biological samples by the Russian and the OPCW experts at the OPCW-licensed St Petersburg Laboratory of the Federal Biomedical Agency would have provided answers to the main questions of where, when and under what circumstances a chemical substance allegedly discovered outside Russia appeared in the blogger's biological materials, which, according to the OPCW Technical Secretariat’s findings, has structural specifications that are similar to toxic agents that were added to the CWC Annex on Chemicals in 2019 at the initiative of Russia, the United States, Canada and the Netherlands.

Omsk doctors did not detect traces of these substances in Navalny’s body. Therefore, it was important to clear up the above issues in order to make sure that traces of certain chemical agents that the military from Germany, France and Sweden hastened to declare “Novichok” did not appear in the blogger's organism or his biological samples during his charter flight to Germany or upon arrival in Berlin. Moreover, this plane, which quickly arrived in Omsk in the early hours of August 21, 2020, also carried a citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany, whose occupation, for some reason, remains undisclosed by the German side, as well as a person associated with the British special services who had recently acquired British citizenship, Maria Pevchikh. For reasons unknown, the fact that she was on board that flight has so far not been confirmed by the German authorities, even though she admitted it in her interview with the Russian BBC Service on September 18, 2020.

Concurrently, several Western countries are directly and through the information resources that they control, as well as via the mainstream media, portraying Alexey Navalny and his associates as the organisational centre of the democratic protest movement in Russia. Corresponding public comments are regularly made by the governments and foreign ministries of various NATO countries. Their press services quickly pick up the fake news concocted by the blogger's “team” which use this support in an effort to, by any means, keep him present on the news agenda in Russia and abroad in order to engage in the internal affairs of our country, including to influence the elections to the State Duma of the 8th convocation to be held on September 17-19, 2021. Berlin and its allies are taking advantage of every opportunity to use the hype around Navalny, that is being artificially created with their own direct involvement, as a pretext to carry out more attacks against us on the forums of various international organisations as part of the strategy for an all-out containment of our country, disguising them as obscure “human rights concerns.” The “Navalny case” scenario was played out with exactly this purpose in mind.

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Source URL: https://russiaeu.ru/en/node/5888