The supporters of blogger Alexei Navalny who found the “poisoned” bottle were not going to hand it over to Russian doctors for examination. This was told on September 18 in an interview with the BBC by a colleague of the oppositionist Maria Pevchikh, who directly discovered the “evidence”.
“The Russian doctors had Alexei himself for 48 hours, who, as far as we know from their endless press releases, speeches, Facebook posts and radio speeches, had all the tests that were needed. One bottle or two does not play any role for Russian doctors, “Pevchikh said.
She clarified that the video, where supporters of the oppositionist examined his hotel room, captured everything that falls into the frame, including bottles, one of which allegedly contained traces of a poisonous substance from the Novichok group.
“We went in, we thought of taking gloves, thanks to the coronavirus, now everyone always has them with us. They opened the door and began to shoot everything that came into the frame, ”said a supporter of Navalny.
Singers noted that when examining the room, they paid attention to everything that could potentially have value, “what a person could touch.”
“We understood that in spite of everything, these bottles are just bottles, nothing significant. But there is a microscopic chance that they will be valuable, ”said the woman.
Earlier on the same day, the press secretary of the President of Russia Dmitry Peskov, commenting on the version with the “poisoned” bottle, said that “there is too much absurdity in this story,” and Russia does not have the opportunity to analyze this “evidence.”
The day before, Navalny said on Instagram that after the employees of the Anti-Corruption Foundation found out that he felt bad on the plane, they called a lawyer, who together with them went up to Navalny’s room and began to collect “evidence” there. On one of the bottles, experts from Germany, two weeks after the incident, allegedly found traces of the Novichok poisonous substance.
However, neither the blogger nor his entourage explained how the bottle got into the hands of foreign specialists.
Navalny felt unwell during the Tomsk-Moscow flight on 20 August. The plane urgently landed in Omsk, the blogger was taken to the ambulance hospital No. 1. He was transported to the Charite clinic in Berlin on August 22, where the Russian was “found” to have signs of intoxication with a substance from the group of cholinesterase inhibitors. However, Omsk doctors did not reveal intoxication with this substance during the examination of the patient.
On September 2, the German government announced that Navalny had been poisoned with a substance from the Novichok group. There was no evidence of this. Berlin does not respond to official requests from the Russian side, while demanding from Moscow some materials for an investigation.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has repeatedly called on the FRG for cooperation. On September 9, the department expressed a strong protest to German Ambassador Gez Andreas von Gaire, noting that the situation is being used to discredit the Russian Federation in the international arena, and further silence of Germany will be regarded as a refusal to establish the truth within the framework of an objective investigation and a provocation /
On the same day, Germany announced that it had submitted the results of Navalny’s analyzes to the OPCW. However, the permanent representative of the Russian Federation to the OPCW, Alexander Shulgin, said that the organization had not received any materials on the “Navalny case”.
On September 14, Charité reported that the blogger’s health had improved, and the next day, Navalny published his first post on Instagram after coming out of a coma.