DISINFO: Navalny was allegedly poisoned to unleash a new anti-Russian campaign
SUMMARY
A group of countries has used this whole dishonest story with the alleged poisoning of Navalny to unleash a new anti-Russian campaign.
RESPONSE
Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative portraying the poisoning of Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny as staged and as a pretext for an anti-Russian campaign.
The prominent Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny fell ill during a flight from Siberia to Moscow on 20 August 2020. Initially hospitalised in Omsk, at the request of his family he was transferred to Charité hospital in Berlin.
At the request of the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, a specialist Bundeswehr laboratory carried out toxicological tests on samples from Alexei Navalny. The results of these tests have revealed unequivocal proof of the presence of a chemical nerve agent from the Novichok group.
By the time the EU sanctions were imposed, the fact of Navalny's poisoning with a Novichok-type agent had been solidly established and were later independently corroborated by labs in France and Sweden.
Russia keeps trying to question these results. However, indisputable evidence exists. After Germany requested its technical assistance, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), where Russia is a member, issued a statement verifying previous statements by the German authorities. Several reports have indicated that the OPCW tests showed that blood and urine samples contained a "cholinesterase inhibitor" similar to two Novichok chemicals that were banned by the Hague-based body in 2019. The OPCW findings corroborated earlier independent conclusions by German, French, and Swedish laboratories.
Read also similar disinformation cases alleging that the Western intelligence agencies are working with Navalny, or that the West will falsely accuse Russia of poisoning Navalny, as with Skripal and Litvinenko.