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Wednesday, 07 October 2020_Russia has denounced as part of a “pre-planned conspiracy” a recent report by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) confirming the presence of a substance similar to Novichok in opposition figure Alexei Navalny’s blood.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Tuesday that the OPCW report was the continuation of the conspiracy scenario that Russia poisoned the Kremlin critic.
“We drew attention to the quite predictable promptness with which the German side ‘agreed’ with the publication of the report on the results of Navalny’s biomaterials research on the OPCW website, which was received literally the day before, apparently specifically for the beginning of the session of the OPCW Executive Council,” the ministry said.
“Thus, the essentially fantasy story, initiated on Berlin’s behalf by its Euro-Atlantic allies, together with the leadership of the OPCW technical secretariat, was continued according to a pre-planned conspiracy scenario,” the Russian ministry said.
The OPCW said in a statement earlier on Tuesday that biomarkers in Navalny’s blood and urine had “similar structural characteristics as the toxic chemicals belonging” to the Novichok group.
The Hague-based agency said, however, that the substance detected in the samples was not on the list of banned chemical weapons and was a new and undeclared variant in the Novichok family.
Germany says the OPCW statement confirms that Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok-group substance.
The Russian ministry further said Moscow intended to present its vision of the situation with Germany’s interaction with the OPCW during the 95th session of the organization’s Executive Council, providing the members states of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) with “the timeline of behind-the-scenes manipulations of the main characters of this performance.”
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