Moscow Sees Merkel’s Visit to Navalny as Attempt to Politicize Situation

"This is the right question, what to think about it. Because many are asking: why and what for? I think these questions should be addressed to the German side," she said, adding, "And as for what we think about it, we see it as an attempt to politicize this matter. Frankly speaking, it is difficult to say anything else about it. Because everything that is going on has nothing to do with real intention to find the truth, to find out what happened, to sort things out, to help find some elements to assemble the picture."

Meanwhile, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Moscow had no doubts that the Technical Secretariat of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which demonstrated its political bias before, will confirm the presence of Novichok in samples taken from blogger Alexey Navalny.

"Taken into account the political bias and partiality of the [OPCW] technical secretariat, demonstrated on several occasions before, we have no doubts that the report about providing "technical assistance" on Germany’s request will confirm traces of the so-called Novichok in Navalny’s biological samples, taken by the Technical Secretariat during a secret operation, which was thoroughly concealed from us by all its participants," the statement says.

The Russian Foreign Ministry reiterated that Moscow has already sent to Germany three requests from the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office for legal assistance over the Navalny affair.

"So far, none of the requests was answered by Berlin. All we hear is that they are ‘still being considered.’ We are told, again and again, to seek clarifications from OPCW, whose leadership, in turn, says we should refer the issue to the German government," it said.

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.

Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov has repeatedly said that Russia is 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".

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