Russia demands Navalny and Skripal test data
Russia has demanded that the West provide evidence related to the alleged poisonings of Russian anti-corruption campaigner Aleksey Navalny and former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter.
The call came after Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, suggested that the results of key tests on her husband’s remains are being withheld from her due to unspecified “political considerations” and because influential people “did not want the uncomfortable truth to emerge at an inopportune time.”
Moscow says it has not received test results from the Charite clinic in Berlin where Navalny was treated after falling ill during a flight in Russia. “We are AGAIN demanding that the Western laboratories provide the test results,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on Telegram on Sunday.She stressed that conclusions must be “grounded in facts, not in imaginary slogans or random memes.”
Navalny died in a Russian prison in February 2024 while serving a sentence on extremism charges.
His family and allies allege that the Russian government previously attempted to kill him in 2020 using the nerve agent Novichok, a claim supported by Western governments.
Navalnaya said laboratories in two unnamed countries outside Russia have independently examined her husband’s biological samples and “concluded he was murdered, specifically poisoned.”
“I demand that the laboratories that conducted the tests publish their results,” she said.
A former Russian intelligence officer, Skripal was released to the UK in a 2010 prisoner swap and fell ill along with his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in 2018. The UK accused Russia of attempting to assassinate them using Novichok, while Moscow denied any involvement. Skripal has not been seen in public since the incident.
