Czech Foreign Minister Confirms Navalny Affair Might Affect Consultations With Russia

Czech Foreign Minister Confirms Navalny Affair Might Affect Consultations With Russia

The significance of the poisoning of Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny is high enough to potentially affect the planned launch of consultations between the Czech Republic and Russia on the normalization of relations, Czech Foreign Minister Tomas Petricek said on Friday

PRAGUE (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 11th September, 2020) The significance of the poisoning of Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny is high enough to potentially affect the planned launch of consultations between the Czech Republic and Russia on the normalization of relations, Czech Foreign Minister Tomas Petricek said on Friday.

Petricek's comment was in response to Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova's statement earlier in the day in which she expressed surprise as to why would Prague try to link the bilateral consultations to the Navalny case.

"Back in early September, I said that the start of consultations with Russia was being postponed amid the post-election events in Belarus. At the same time, I said that although the consultations between the Czech Republic and Russia were a bilateral matter, the clarification of circumstances around Navalny's condition was so important that we cannot rule out that it would affect our consultations," Petricek told journalists.

The minister emphasized that Prague would built its further course of relations with Moscow depending on what the European Union determines as its common stance on the Navalny issue.

On August 20, Navalny fell ill during a domestic Russian flight. He was initially treated in the Siberian city of Omsk, where the plane made an emergency landing. Two days later, once doctors established he was fit for a cross-border aerial transportation, the man was flown to the Berlin-based Charite hospital for further treatment.

It was not until September 2 that German doctors claimed Navalny's samples contained traces of a nerve agent from the Novichok group. Leonid Rink, a scientist directly involved in the development of Novichok, told Sputnik that Navalny's symptoms were uncharacteristic of poisoning with this toxin.

According to the Russian authorities, Berlin so far provided Moscow with neither an official notification on the findings, nor assistance in the investigation launched by the Russian law enforcement immediately upon Navalny's initial emergency hospitalization in Russia.

The Russian-Czech relations suffered a blow last September after the Czech authorities dismantled a Prague-based monument to Marshal Ivan Konev of the Soviet Union, who led the liberation of Czechoslovakia from the Nazis during the Second World War, to a museum.