Russia summons German envoy over Navalny's alleged poisoning

Moscow, Sep 10 The Russian Foreign Ministry said that it has summoned the German Ambassador to Moscow, Geza Andreas von Geyr and expressed a strong protest in connection with the "unfounded accusations and ultimatum" related to the alleged poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

While summoning the envoy, the Ministry on Wednesday also accused Germany of an "obvious use of the situation that has arisen with it as a pretext for dis-crediting our country in the international arena", reports Xinhua news agency.

Russia also demanded Germany to provide Navalny's medical examination results and test samples for the comprehensive study and verification by specialists in Moscow, it said.

Russia will regard the failure to provide the materials as a refusal of the German government to establish the truth and its actions in connection with Navalny as a "gross hostile provocation against Russia, fraught with consequences for Russian-German relations, as well as a serious complication of the international situation", the Ministry added.

On Tuesday, G7 Foreign Ministers and the High Representative of the European Union issued a statement demanding Russia to "urgently and fully establish transparency on who is responsible for this abhorrent poisoning attack".

Navalny, the 44-year-old staunch critic of Putin, fell ill on a flight from the Russian city of Tomsk to Moscow on August 20 and the plane had to make an emergency landing in the city of Omsk.

He reportedly went into coma after being hospitalized in Omsk and was later transferred to Germany for treatment.

On Monday, the Charite hospital in Berlin, where Navalny is being treated, issued a statement saying that his condition had improved and he was being weaned off mechanical ventilation after coming round from his coma.

Earlier on Wednesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a separate statement complaining that the German authorities had consistently avoided providing Moscow with Navalny's medical examination results.

"The absence of the above information does not allow Russian law enforcement agencies to use all the necessary procedural mechanisms to establish the circumstances of the incident," it added.

Earlier in the day, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Moscow had accumulated a lot of questions to Germany about an "absolutely inappropriate attitude towards the official requests that we send to Berlin".

( With inputs from IANS )