MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 17th December, 2020) Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Thursday he would not comment on possibility of an additional investigation of the reports that opposition figure Alexey Navalny was being followed.
"I have already said that I do not want to and will not comment on the patient. And the president has said why: a) signs of special services and b) we have said repeatedly, too: repeated calls for overthrowing the authorities raise a lot of questions," Peskov told reporters.
On Monday, Navalny published a media investigation, in which he suggested he knew the Names of eight "FSB agents" who allegedly followed him wherever he went in Russia and repeatedly tried to poison him. Articles on this investigation were simultaneously published by CNN, Germany's Spiegel magazine and the Bellingcat website. The investigation was done largely by Bellingcat, which has posted a number of stories that are critical of Russia.
The reports rely on airplane tickets and phone billings, which are impossible to obtain or verify legally. The investigation does not provide proof that the alleged FSB agents did anything that directly led to the poisoning. The material says that there was no evidence that any of the "FSB employees" were in Omsk at the time of Navalny's hospitalization, which contradicts a recent report in The Sunday Times that suggested there had been also an attempt to poison Navalny there.
Navalny fell ill while aboard a domestic Russian flight on August 20. He was initially treated in the Siberian city of Omsk, where the plane had to urgently land. Local doctors suggested metabolic malfunctions as main diagnosis and said there were no traces of poison in his system. Several days later, he was flown to the Charite hospital in Berlin for further treatment. The German government then claimed to have evidence of his poisoning with a nerve agent from the Novichok group. Laboratories in France and Sweden have subsequently backed this conclusion. In September, Navalny was discharged from the hospital.
President Vladimir Putin has recently said that Russia is ready to receive case materials from other countries and investigate this situation, but none of those countries has shared its evidence with Moscow.
Moscow insists that Berlin present the biological materials to corroborate the chemical poisoning, so that it could open a criminal case. According to Russian authorities, they have already sent several requests for legal assistance to Berlin, but to no avail.
