Sept.10 (EIRNS)—Germany’s ambassador to Russia Geza Andreas von Geyr informed Russia’s First Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Titov on Sept. 9 that Germany was not going to comply with Russia’s legal request from Aug. 27 to hand over any medical data on Alexey Navalny. Four days earlier, Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas had announced the opposite: “We approved this request for legal assistance long ago.… And, as a matter of fact, there is no reason to turn it down.” Now, TASS reports that they obtained a message from the German Embassy that Geyr stated yesterday that the Navalny case is not a matter between Germany and Russia, and that NATO, the EU, the G7 had all made statements — implying that this superseded any legal obligation Germany had towards Russia. Germany’s deputy spokeswoman Martina Fietz confirmed this yesterday, saying that Berlin had no intention of delivering the evidence to Russia and that it seems “no reason” to do so.
On Sept. 6, there was no reason not to comply with their legal obligation to Russia and, on Sept. 9, no reason to comply. Reason is running a strange course in Germany this week.
Fietz seemed to say that everything was handed over to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), answering a direct question with the contorted expression, “[Y]ou can assume that all the conditions have been met for the OPCW to do its work.”
Germany’s Defense Ministry was asked about Russia’s claim that Berlin had failed to provide any evidence to back up their “Novichok” conclusion last week. Spokesman Arne Collatz was more direct, though still evasive, saying simply that the data had been given to the OPCW. It appears that Germany’s new position is that their Sept.2 “Novichok family” finding nullifies any legal requirements with Russia, even though the Aug. 27 legal request from Moscow’s Prosecutor General’s office was about all medical evidence about their Russian citizen — including but not limited to any findings of poison. The strange perambulations of Germany — refusing all medical data and reports from Russia on the Aug. 21 handover of Navalny, and complete silence and non-acknowledgment of the legal request from Aug. 27 to Sept. 6 — is accounted for by their evident intention all along to produce a “Novichok” finding.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov pointed to the issues of the provenance of Navalny’s actual medical samples: “We don’t know what they have given to the OPCW. We naturally prefer that they hand over those analyses directly to us.” It is worth noting that one has to ignore a) the finding of no poisons in Navalny on Aug. 20, as found by three different medical labs, b) the presence of “Novichok family” poisons in Western labs; and c) the evident “watering down” of Novichok so to leave “evidence” but not kill, in order to assume that what OPCW now has, is any evidence of what happened to Navalny on Aug. 20.
Otherwise, Peskov repeated what he has said from the beginning: Russian authorities had launched a preliminary check into what happened to Navalny, but emphasized that they need proof of his poisoning to conduct a full-fledged criminal inquiry. He added, “We have been left puzzling over what kind of difficulties could have prevented them from sharing their findings with us.”
