Germany has evidence Putin critic Navalny was poisoned with Novichok

A comatose critic of Russian President Vladmir Putin being treated in a Berlin hospital was poisoned with a nerve agent of the Novichok family, a German government spokesman said on Wednesday.

Toxology tests of blood samples from Alexei Navalny conducted at a German military laboratory produced “unequivocal evidence” that the Russian opposition critic was poisoned with Novichok, Steffen Seibert said in an emailed statement.

Russian prosecutors have asked Germany to provide details of medical tests conducted on Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition politician lying in a coma in Berlin after a suspected poisoning in Siberia last month, a newspaper reported on Wednesday.

Russian newspaper RBC said the general prosecutor’s office had asked Germany’s justice ministry for information on Navalny’s treatment, including test results for drugs, poisons, heavy metals and cholinesterase inhibitors.

Russian prosecutors said last month they saw no need for a criminal investigation into the case as they had found no sign that any crime had been committed.

Navalny, a thorn in the side of President Vladimir Putin for the past decade, was taken ill on a flight from Siberia to Moscow on August 20 after drinking tea at the airport. His allies believe he was the latest of several Kremlin critics to be deliberately poisoned, but Russian authorities have said there is no evidence of this.

Navalny was flown last month to the Charite hospital in Berlin, where doctors said he may have been poisoned with a cholinesterase inhibitor, a substance found in nerve toxins such as the one used in the attempted poisoning of a former Russian double agent in England in 2018.