The Kremlin, faced with Western calls to conduct a transparent investigation, insisted Wednesday August 26 that it could not consider that the opponent Alexei Navalny was poisoned until a specific substance had not been identified.
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" We totally disagree at this stage with the various hasty formulations widely used to say that there is a high probability of poisoning, " said Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for President Vladimir Putin during a briefing with journalists. " How can we speak of poisoning if there is no poison? ", he added.
German doctors treating the opponent in Berlin announced that he had been poisoned by " a substance from the group of cholinesterase inhibitors ", but could not say which one. Alexei Navalny, who made a name for himself investigating the corruption of the Russian elite and those around Vladimir Putin, was uneasy on a plane in Siberia last week.
His entourage immediately denounced the poisoning, and fought for a medical transfer to Germany, suspecting Russian doctors of trying to cover up the crime. Reacting to calls launched by the West for three days for a transparent investigation, Dmitri Peskov judged that this " was not a prerogative of the presidential administration, of the Kremlin " but of the police.
No investigation in Russia
No investigation has been opened in Russia, despite a request to this effect also from relatives of Alexey Navalny. Nevertheless, Dmitry Peskov, who never publicly pronounces the name of the opponent, affirmed that Russia “ like everyone else had a clear interest in understanding what plunged the patient treated in a clinic into a coma. Berlin ”.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Atlantic Alliance Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg are the latest Western officials to urge Russia to investigate, after Berlin, Paris and Washington. In Russia, a controversial businessman, known to be close to Putin and in conflict with Alexeï Navalny, has promised to " ruin " the opponent in the context of lawsuits for a dispute over a restaurant company. " If Navalny returns his soul to God, I have no intention of persecuting him in this world (...) If he lives, he will have to answer with all the rigor of Russian law ", declared Yevgeny Prigojine , suspected of being linked to a " troll factory " that Washington accuses of electoral interference, and to the opaque group of mercenaries Wagner.
