DISINFO: New OPCW report proves West fabricated story of Navalny's "poisoning"
SUMMARY
A discrepancy in the latest OPCW report proves that a certain group of states has used the narrative of Alexei Navalny's poisoning as a pretext to launch yet another anti-Russian campaign, according to Russia's OPCW envoy Aleksandr Shulgin.
The report in question states that on 20 August, Germany asked the OPCW Technical Secretariat for technical assistance on Navalny's suspected poisoning. On that day, however, Navalny had not yet arrived in Germany and was still being treated in Russia.
The OPCW never responded to the Russian delegation's request for comment on this inconsistency.
RESPONSE
The story advances a recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative concerning the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
The story is entirely based on a typo. Earlier OPCW documents confirm that the German government submitted the request on 4 September, a full two weeks following Navalny's poisoning. Crucially, documentary record shows that Shulgin himself had been aware of this since at least October 2020, although this did not stop him from promulgating the present claim.
The prominent Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny fell ill during a flight from Siberia to Moscow on the 20th of 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.