Navalny was poisoned with nerve agent, Germany says

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, currently under treatment in a German hospital, was poisoned with a deadly nerve agent from the Novichok family, the German government said Wednesday.

Citing what it called “unequivocal evidence,” Berlin demanded an explanation from Moscow in a case that seems bound to raise tensions once more between Russia and the West.

“Mr. Navalny has been the victim of a crime,” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said in a statement. “It raises very serious questions that only the Russian government can and must answer.”

Novichok, a Soviet-era weapon invented for military use, was used against Sergei Skripal, a former Soviet spy, and his daughter in a 2018 attack in Salisbury, England, that the British government attributed to Russia’s military intelligence arm, the GRU.

At the time of the Skripal poisoning, experts said that the stockpile of Novichok was tightly guarded, and expressed doubts that the substance would be used by anyone other than a state-sponsored agent.

Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s chief of staff, echoed that view in a Twitter post Wednesday, saying, “In 2020, poisoning Navalny with Novichok is the same as leaving an autograph at the scene of the crime.”

Toxicology tests carried out by a German army laboratory revealed the “doubtless presence of a nerve agent from the Novichok group” in the system of Navalny, who was flown to Germany on Aug. 22 after he collapsed on a flight from Siberia to Moscow.