The United States fell into the so-called sanctions dependence, and other countries of the world do not approve of this trend. This was stated by the press secretary of the President of Russia Dmitry Peskov on September 22.
The journalists asked a Kremlin representative to comment on possible sanctions that Washington threatened to impose in response to the incident with blogger Alexei Navalny. Peskov forwarded the question to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, saying that he “leaves the pleasure” to comment on such statements to the representative of the department, Maria Zakharova.
“As for such a sanctions dependence of the United States in general, it is difficult to call it any other way, it is well known to all countries of the world. It is unlikely that anyone approves of such activities, ”added Peskov.
The day before, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that after clarifying all the details of the incident with the Russian, Washington “will react appropriately in the face of what could happen.” The United States also expects the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to present the results of an investigation into the incident within one to two weeks.
In turn, US President Donald Trump refused to answer the question about the “guilty” in the situation with the blogger.
Alexei Navalny felt unwell during the Tomsk-Moscow flight on 20 August. The plane urgently landed in Omsk, the blogger was taken to the emergency hospital No. 1, and later transported to the Charite clinic in Berlin. There, the Russian was “found” to have signs of intoxication with a substance from the group of cholinesterase inhibitors. However, Omsk doctors during the examination of the patient did not reveal intoxication with this substance.
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 threatened that further silence in Germany would be regarded as a refusal to establish the truth within the framework of an objective investigation and a provocation, Gazeta.ru writes.
On the same day, the Federal Republic of Germany announced that they had transferred 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, the Charité reported that the blogger’s health had improved. The next day, Navalny published his first post on Instagram after coming out of a coma, and on September 17, a blog entry appeared on his blog that poison was allegedly found in a bottle of water from which he drank in a Tomsk hotel.
The blogger said that when he felt bad, the employees of the Anti-Corruption Foundation called a lawyer and together with him began to collect “evidence” in Navalny’s hotel room. It is alleged that on one of the bottles, experts from Germany, two weeks after the incident, allegedly found traces of the Novichok poisonous substance. At the same time, neither the blogger nor his entourage explained how the bottle got into the hands of foreign experts.
Director of the Foundation for the Study of Democracy Problems Maxim Grigoriev, in an interview with the REN TV channel, called the version with the poisoned bottle absurd and said that such accusations seemed obviously made up.