Kremlin slams Navalny’s claims against Putin as unacceptable

MOSCOW, Oct 1, 2020, TASS. Russian blogger Alexey Navalny’s claims against Russian President Vladimir Putin are insulting, unfounded and unacceptable, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday, TASS reported.

“We believe that such accusations against the Russian president are absolutely unfounded and unacceptable,” Peskov told reporters, commenting on Navalny’s claims that the Russian leader had been allegedly linked to the “poisoning” incident.

Russia considers that some of these statements are “absolutely insulting and unacceptable,” Peskov said.

In comment on Navany’s interview with Der Spiegel, in which the blogger spoke about Putin, the Kremlin spokesman noted that “this rhetoric, which borders on insults, is a well-known tool of those who seek to put themselves at the same level with the head of state and claim some kind of participation in the political struggle.”

“The president’s real rivals in the political struggle are other people and forces, they are not quasi and marginal, this is real opposition,” Peskov stressed. “That’s why we don’t consider it possible to participate in any discussion in the future and won’t give any comments or make any statement on this issue,” he said.

Russia seeks to investigate the case with the Berlin patient and establish the causes of the incident, Peskov assured. He again highlighted that in order to do this Russia needs to obtain information from those who had found the traces of poisoning in Navalny’s samples.

When asked to comment on the statement of Russian State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin that Putin had saved Navalny’s life, Peskov noted that he could not confirm this. “I know for sure that the Omsk doctors were engaged in saving Navalny’s life.”

Speaking on Navalny’s plans to return to Russia, the Kremlin spokesman stressed: “Any Russian citizen can return back home at any time, and there is no heroism here.” “They can undergo treatment in our country and almost all people do so. Lives are saved in our country and the life of this patient was also saved in Russia,” Peskov noted.

Russian blogger Alexey Navalny was rushed to a local hospital in the Siberian city of Omsk on August 20 after collapsing on a Moscow-bound flight from Tomsk. He fell into a coma and was put on a ventilator in an intensive care unit. On August 22, he was airlifted to Berlin and admitted to the Charite hospital.

On September 2, Berlin claimed that having examined Navalny’s test samples, German government toxicologists had come to the conclusion that the blogger had been affected by a toxic agent belonging to the Novichok family.

Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia was ready for comprehensive cooperation with Germany. He pointed out that no poisonous substances had been detected in Navalny’s system prior to his transfer to Berlin. He said on September 23 that Moscow wanted to find out what had happened to Navalny, “but so far Russian investigators have no evidence of the presence of any toxic substances, let alone chemical warfare agents, in Navalny’s body.”