Berlin ; Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok, the German government said revealing new test results.Navalny, a politician and corruption investigator who is one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critics, fell ill on a flight back to Moscow from Siberia on Aug 20 and was taken to a hospital in the Siberian city of Omsk after the plane made an emergency landing.
He was transferred two days later to Berlin’s Charité hospital, where doctors last week said initial tests indicated Navalny had been poisoned.Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said in a statement Wednesday that testing by a special German military laboratory had now shown “proof without doubt of a chemical nerve agent from the Novichok group.”British authorities identified Novichok as the poison used in 2018 on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England. The nerve agent is a cholinesterase inhibitor, part of the class of substances that doctors at the Charite initially identified in Navalny.
Germany demanded a response from the Russian government.Seibert said the German government would inform its partners in the European Union and NATO about the test results. He said that it will consult with its partners in light of the Russian response “on an appropriate joint response.” Germany also will contact the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, he added.Navalny’s allies in Russia have insisted he was deliberately poisoned by the country’s authorities, accusations that the Kremlin rejected as “empty noise.”
The Russian doctors who treated Navalny in Siberia repeatedly contested the German hospital’s poisoning conclusion, saying they had ruled out poisoning as a diagnosis and that their tests for cholinesterase inhibitors came back negative.In Charité’s latest update, the hospital said Navalny was still in an induced coma but in stable condition.
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