Kremlin calls Navalny illness ‘hot air’

‘NO NEED’ TO PROBE

MOSCOW • Russia’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday an alleged poisoning of opposition politician Alexei Navalny was not of benefit to the country’s leadership.

Navalny, an outspoken opponent of President Vladimir Putin, collapsed on a plane to Moscow and was airlifted to Germany for treatment from the Siberian city of Omsk on Saturday.

“We consider accusation in some intention to ‘cover the truth’ voiced by Western capital towards Omsk doctors to be deeply insulting,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.

The Kremlin said it saw no need for now to investigate circumstances leading up to Navalny’s grave illness, and that a German clinic’s initial diagnosis of poisoning was not yet conclusive.

Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday called for an investigation and for Russia to hold the perpetrators accountable after German doctors found indications of a toxic substance in his body.

But Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the German clinic had not conclusively identified the substance behind Navalny’s illness and that it was unclear why German doctors were “rushing” to use the word poisoning.

“There must be a reason for an investigation. For the moment, all you and I see is that the patient is in a coma,” Peskov told reporters.

Any suggestions, he added, that Putin was somehow involved in Navalny’s illness were untrue and “hot air” that the Kremlin would not take seriously.

He said that if poisoning was definitively established as the cause, “then of course, this will be a reason for an investigation.”

In response to the Kremlin’s comments, Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said it was “obvious the crime wouldn’t be investigated properly and the criminal found.”

The Speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament, a Putin ally, said one of its committees would launch a probe to determine whether foreign forces had played a hand in Navalny’s illness in order to fuel tensions in Russia.

Demands from abroad for an independent probe are intensifying.

On Monday, top European Union diplomat Josep Borrell asked Russia to investigate, a call echoed on Tuesday by U.S. ambassador to Russia John Sullivan and Sweden’s Foreign Minister Ann Linde.

German doctors treating Navalny at a Berlin hospital said on Monday that medical examinations indicated poisoning with some kind of cholinesterase inhibitor, although the specific substance is not yet known.

Navalny has been a thorn in the Kremlin’s side for more than a decade, exposing what he says is high-level graft and mobilizing protests.