Page 21 - RusRPTOct20

A video posted on Navalny’s Instagram account showed members of his team searching the room he had just left in the Xander Hotel in Tomsk on August 20, an hour after they learned he had fallen sick in suspicious circumstances.
“It was decided to gather up everything that could even hypothetically be useful and hand it to the doctors in Germany. The fact that the case would not be investigated in Russia was quite obvious,” the post said.
The video of the abandoned hotel room shows two water bottles on a desk, and another on a bedside table. Navalny’s team, wearing protective gloves, are seen placing items into blue plastic bags.
The Kremlin has denied it has any Novichok and that all stocks of the nerve agent that was develpped in the 70s ad 80s were destroyed in Russia in accordance with the protocols and regulations of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Sergei Naryshkin told reporters on the same day.
“And this [destruction] was recorded in due course. Therefore, to say that there are either production facilities or old stocks of chemical warfare agents on the territory of Russia is, of course, misinformation,” Naryshkin said.
In addition, he added that doctors in Omsk conducted research on all protocols and on modern equipment.
German doctors announced “unequivocal evidence” that Novichok had been used on August 24 and laboratories in France and Sweden confirmed the finding a few days later.
The Navalny saga has turned into a major diplomatic scandal that is likely to be very damaging to Russo-European relations. The Kremlin has responded to the accusations, not by launching a domestic investigations, but by trying to muddy the waters and hurling accusations at Europe, including suggesting that the doctors on the ambulance plane that flew Navalny to Berlin had poisoned him with Novichok.
This week Russia presented the EU with nine “​inconsistencies​” regarding the “incident, which occurred with a Russian political activist and blogger Alexey Navalny.” Acknowledging that its staff members are not toxicology experts, Russia’s EU Permanent Mission says Navalny’s sudden illness precipitated “a rapidly growing information campaign in the EU, both in official circles and the media,” reports Meduza.
One of main arguments is that “Navalny Two-Percent” is too unimportant in Russian politics to warrant murdering as he polled only 2% in poll last year of ranking politicians in the country.
“What would be the reason for the Russian authorities to poison Alexey Navalny, taking into account that his actual popularity level hardly reaches 2%, according to the recent survey conducted in July 2020 by the Levada Center, an independent, non-governmental polling and sociological research organization?” Moscow’s EU Permanent Mission said in the letter.
21 ​RUSSIA Country Report​ October 2020 ​ ​www.intellinews.com