Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov responded today to Germany’s about-face on their legal responsibilities to provide Russia with medical evidence related to the Navalny case. “We’re accustomed to unfounded accusations. When the official representative of the German government says that the request from the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office has been directed to independent judiciary agencies, and so the German government can do nothing about it, while demanding that we conduct an investigation, it resembles the precedent created by our Western colleagues following the Salisbury [Skripal] poisoning incident. If such logic prevails, that would only mean that they put themselves above the law, above everyone else.” (Former GRU agent Sergei Skripal and his visiting daughter Yulia were poisoned on March 4, 2018 in Salisbury, England.)
Earlier, the statement of the Russian Foreign Ministry after the Sept. 9 meeting with German Ambassador Geza Andreas von Geyr, read: “A strong protest was declared to the ambassador over the unfounded accusations presented by the federal government of the Federal Republic of Germany against Russia in the context of the illness and hospitalization of Russian citizen Alexei Navalny, and the obvious use of his situation by Berlin as an excuse to discredit our country on the international arena,” TASS reported. The ministry also repeated the demand that Germany provide a detailed answer to the official request of the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office dated Aug. 27, 2020, asking to provide details on Navalny’s case — and if Berlin does not respond to Russia’s request, the Russian Foreign Ministry will consider it a “blatant hostile provocation,” which “is fraught with consequences for Russian-German relations” and may complicate the international situation.
