Russian State Duma speaker accuses West of being behind Navalny’s case, crisis in Belarus
Alexei Navalny is collaborating with Western intelligence services, Vyacheslav Volodin, Chairman of Russia’s State Duma, said on October, 1. He called the opposition leader ‘a shameless person and a skunk’ and said that ‘Putin saved his life’.
Earlier, in an interview with Der Spiegel, Navalny announced his intention to return to Russia and suggested that Vladimir Putin might have been involved in his being poisoned.
In turn, Volodin stated such statement ‘fit perfectly into the scheme of things’ if what had happened to him had been staged by foreign intelligence services.
According to him, the fact that Germany’s Bundestag and the State Duma failed to form a working group on the situation is indicative of the murder attempt’s being a staging. Russia, despite requests from our authorities, had not received neither biological materials nor reports of doctors who examined Navalny, he said.
“This once again shows that all this had been orchestrated by Western countries in order to whip up tensions in Russia right when the Belarusian election results were being counted, and to block our country and prevent it from defending the sovereignty of our allied state. Those who wanted to get their hands on Belarus failed to do so,” Russian news agency TASS quotes him as saying.
The poisoning of Alexei Navalny and the crisis in Belarus are ‘links in the same chain’, Volodin believes.
“It is quite obvious that Navalny is cooperating with secret services and the authorities of Western countries. He is working in their interests,” he added.
In early September, Alyaksandr Lukashenka called the poisoning of Navalny ‘a hoax’, claiming that Belarusian electronic warfare specialists intercepted an ‘interesting’ conversation between representatives of Poland and Germany. Lukashenka told Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin that a group of Western experts could have intentionally provided Angela Merkel’s office with fake information and falsified the statement made by her; they aimed to discourage Vladimir Putin from ‘poking his nose into the affairs of Belarus’.
Alexei Navalny suddenly collapsed on the plane when he was returning to Moscow from Siberia. After an emergency landing, the politician was hospitalised in the Omsk emergency hospital. According to local doctors, the politician became sick due to metabolic disorders.
Doctors from the German clinic Charité, where Navalny was transported a few days later, said that the politician had been poisoned with a substance from the Novichok group. On September 14, three independent laboratories confirmed the report by the German authorities.
Navalny also refused to cooperate with Russian law enforcement agencies that demand the murder attempt be investigated by both Germany and Russia. Earlier, Prosecutor General’s Office in Berlin stated that it would provide information about Navalny to Russian investigators only if he gave his consent to it.
