Russia rejects calls for probe of poisoning
MOSCOW — The Russian government said Tuesday that it was willing to launch a vigorous investigation into the recent sickening of a leading opposition figure but only if it could be proved he was poisoned.
On Monday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel endorsed the conclusion of doctors at a Berlin hospital that dissident Alexei Navalny indeed had been poisoned on a flight from Siberia, and she called for an immediate investigation.
For the time being, though, that doesn’t seem likely to happen.
“We don’t understand on what grounds our German colleagues are in such a hurry to use the word poison,” Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on a conference call. “A substance has not been identified.”
Navalny, 44, who for almost a decade has challenged President Vladimir Putin politically and criticized his entourage for corruption, became one in a series of Kremlin opponents to collapse suddenly into a coma after drinking tea.
Doctors at the Siberian hospital that initially treated Navalny said laboratory results showed no signs of poisoning, while the hospital’s head doctor pointed to a metabolic disorder caused by low blood sugar as the most likely cause.
At the request of his family, Navalny, still in a coma, was evacuated to Germany by air ambulance Saturday, and on Monday doctors at Charité Hospital in Berlin said he had been poisoned.
While they were not able to name the exact poison, the doctors said tests showed it came from a group of chemicals known as cholinesterase inhibitors, which interfere with the nervous system. They’re used to treat Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia and in some forms also are found in chemical weapons and pesticides.
Merkel, in a statement issued Monday, said “clinical findings indicate Alexei Navalny was poisoned,” and that Russia should investigate.
It was a clear signal of support from the German leader for Russian opposition figures, defectors, journalists and human rights activists who have said for years that the Russian security services conduct secret operations to kill or incapacitate them with poison.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo similarly urged a thorough inquiry.
“The United States is deeply concerned by reported preliminary conclusions from German medical experts that Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny was poisoned,” he said, calling for “a comprehensive investigation.”
France on Tuesday also echoed the German position. A Foreign Ministry statement called the poisoning of Navalny a “criminal act perpetrated against a major actor of Russian political life.”
Peskov said the German finding fell short of proof. Russian doctors, too, had detected low levels of cholinesterase in Navalny, he said, but ventured that this could have been caused by a variety of factors and not just by poison.
He noted the German doctors’ failure to identify a specific toxin.
“The substance is absent,” he said. “Unfortunately, it cannot be found, and analyses do not show it.”
Navalny’s wife, spokeswoman and personal doctor had said Russian authorities endangered the opposition leader’s life by delaying his medical evacuation from Siberia for a day to allow time for the poison to metabolize, becoming more difficult to identify.
Peskov also denied a pattern of poisoning of Russian opposition figures.
“Here, I would not sketch out some tendency of murders, occurring in different countries of the world, of those who criticize the president of Russia,” he said. “This is not the case.”