The alleged poisoning of Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny with Novichok might be used by the United States as a tool for pressuring Germany into halting the Russian-developed Nord Stream 2 gas project, German lawmakers told Sputnik on Friday
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 18th September, 2020) The alleged poisoning of Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny with Novichok might be used by the United States as a tool for pressuring Germany into halting the Russian-developed Nord Stream 2 gas project, German lawmakers told Sputnik on Friday.
Navalny was flown to the Berlin-based Charite hospital late last month after suffering a medical emergency. The German government eventually claimed that he had been poisoned with a nerve agent from the Novichok group. This prompted many in the West to call for new economic sanctions against Russia, including by halting the construction of Nord Stream 2, a massive offshore pipeline designed to pump Russian gas directly to Germany.
"It is to be suspected that the Navalny case will be used to further torpedo Nord Stream 2. Opponents of the pipeline have already demonstrated their willingness to ignore international law with their threats of extraterritorial sanctions," Steffen Kotre, the spokesman for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the Bundestag Economic Affairs and Energy Committee, said, adding that "anti-Russian forces" are taking advantage of it.
His opinion was echoed by Hansjorg Muller, another AfD member of the Bundestag Economic Affairs and Energy Committee, who said that the German government and loyal media "might use Navalny or even less of a justification to impose further sanctions on Russia."
According to the lawmaker, while Navalny is too much of a minuscule figure to trigger that sort of risky behavior from the Russian government, he is inherently connected to Russia in the minds of people, as is the Novichok label, even if merely by the name, so both were easy to use to opportunely drag Moscow into a scandal potentially punishable by economic sanctions.
"It all depends on what the US is asking/pressing Europe to do. Obviously the US have a very good handle specifically on Germany in the EU. On the other hand, I do not believe that [German Minister of Economic Affairs and Energy Peter] Altmaier or [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel personally want further sanctions against Russia, nor want to kill NS2, but we don't know what US-pressure is going on behind the scenes. It seems pretty massive," Muller added.
Whatever the development, sanctions against Russia over the Navalny case will have to come with factual evidence as a prerequisite, according to Kotre, considering that the 2018 poisoning scandal around ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the UK town of Salisbury still lacks one.
On August 20, Navalny was urgently hospitalized in the Russian Siberian city of Omsk after suffering an acute health condition during a domestic flight. As lab tests found no traces of poisonous substances in the opposition figure's system, Russian doctors opined that the deterioration could have been caused by an abrupt drop of glucose in his blood due to metabolic disbalance.
Navalny was transported to Germany two days later. It was not until September 2 that Berlin claimed Navalny's samples contained traces of a Novichok group substance.
The German government claimed it received a confirmation of the diagnosis from France and Sweden, and submitted the case materials to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Berlin refused to make the materials available to Moscow, citing Russia's membership in the organization, despite the requests from Russian investigators, who launched a probe immediately after Navalny's hospitalization in Omsk.
On September 7, Navalny was awakened from his medically-induced coma and taken off the ventilator.
The Kremlin has refuted as inadmissible any hints about its links to the incident.
