The Russian Foreign Ministry commented on the situation with Alexei Navalny and called "deeply offensive" the accusations against the Omsk doctors about the alleged attempts to "hide the truth" about the blogger's condition.
The department emphasized that the staff of the Omsk emergency hospital No.1 (BSMP-1) immediately provided Navalny with highly qualified assistance, and the full medical history of the victim was transferred to a team of German doctors who arrived in Omsk to transport the patient to the Berlin clinic Charite.
“We hope that German doctors will show an equally professional approach and will not allow the results of their laboratory studies to be used for any politicized purposes,” the ministry said in a statement.
The Foreign Ministry clarified that on August 25, Russian-American consultations were held in Moscow with US First Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Bigan, during which the issue of Navalny's health was raised. The department reported that the American side had previously identified what happened as an "incident" and stated that "if the version of his poisoning as an oppositionist is confirmed, Washington will take measures against which the reaction of American society to Russian interference in the US presidential elections in 2016 ".
"Drawing the attention of the interlocutor to the inadmissibility of unfounded accusations, they stressed that the Russian leadership stands for the most thorough and most objective investigation of the incident," the ministry said.
The Russian foreign ministry said it drew attention to "the suspicious haste with which the version of the deliberate poisoning of Navalny was picked up in Washington and Brussels."
“The question inevitably arises - who benefits from this? The Russian leadership is clearly not. Moreover, we once again reminded of our readiness to consider not only this particular case, but also the so-called “cases of Litvinenko and Skripals”, openly, impartially and with really established facts on hand, which are now again amicably recalled by the Western media on command ” - stressed the Foreign Ministry.
We will remind, earlier, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell called on the Russian authorities to organize an "independent and transparent investigation into the poisoning" of Alexei Navalny. He said that the preliminary results of analyzes of the Berlin clinic "Charite" allegedly testify to the poisoning of Navalny. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas also made a call to "conduct a thorough investigation of the incident".
State Duma Speaker Viacheslav Volodin, commenting on the statements of Western politicians, noted that they may indicate a possible provocation for accusations against Russia. He also said that the Chamber's Security and Anti-Corruption Committee will analyze the incident with Navalny.
“We need to comprehensively study what happened. The State Duma Security Committee will be instructed to analyze what happened in order to understand whether it was an attempt on the part of foreign states to harm the health of a Russian citizen in order to create tension within Russia, as well as formulate new accusations against our country, ”Volodin said.
On August 20, at the Omsk airport, an S7 airline plane made an emergency landing on the Tomsk-Moscow flight. On board was Alexei Navalny, who suddenly became ill during the flight. The man was urgently admitted to a local hospital. Navalny was unconscious, doctors assessed his condition as consistently serious.
The head physician of the hospital, Alexander Murakhovsky, said that all tests carried out in the chemical-toxicological laboratory showed negative results for the tested spectrum of substances.
Relatives insisted on the transfer of Navalny to the German clinic "Charite", where he was delivered on August 22, after the doctors of the Omsk hospital considered the patient's condition stable.
During a press conference held on August 24, Alexander Murakhovsky and his deputy Anatoly Kalinichenko reiterated that the Tomsk and Moscow laboratories had not detected any chemical and toxicological substances in Navalny's body that could be regarded as poisons or as products of the action of poisons.
At the same time, the doctors of the Charite clinic issued a statement in which they said that the data from clinical studies indicate Navalny's poisoning with substances from the group of cholinesterase inhibitors. Charité clarified that Navalny is still in the intensive care unit in an artificial coma.
The Ministry of Health of the Omsk Region reacted to the statement of the clinic, saying that the studies carried out upon admission of the patient on a wide range of narcotic, synthetic substances, psychodysleptics and medicinal substances, including cholinesterase inhibitors, showed a negative result.